Rebecca Ray: Crediting MasterCard Learning with Business Success

"I went through this when Prudential became a public company in the late '90s," Ray said. "This process is very respectful of the adult learner. It assumes that they have knowledge and experiences that they can share and bring to the discussion. It's highly interactive, visual, and it helps with the retention and the understanding. We partnered with them to build a series of three maps. They're very graphic, very colorful, built specifically for us with our strategy, our information and our thoughts. The first one was about the competitive landscape. The second one was our financial model. The third was our strategy, and the people component of that strategy.

"We talked about our leadership model, our corporate competencies and our relationships with customers. We had a kickoff at the very end of June, and we launched this in 36 cities over the next couple of weeks. We got to 93 percent of our population in these four-hour, face-to-face sessions. It was a massive, massive undertaking but successful because several hundred business lines were trained as table coaches to lead these discussions. Bob Selander did a video, as did Chris McWilton. The local leader in a region would talk a little bit about why this was important to do and how this was part of a discussion about becoming a new company. Then the master facilitators - generally the HR representatives in whatever office it was - would kick off a session, and the table coaches would lead employees through a discussion, so they would get it at the end of that four-hour session. There's about 7 percent of the population remaining that will be getting an online version to give them an experience with this, as well. We'll be following those sessions with another set of maps that will continue that strategy conversation in 2007."