VizThink Blog

Strategy Alignment and Deployment using Visualization

Many companies have good (or at least okay strategies).  Where they tend to fall down is on implementation.  There are lots of reasons that strategies fail.  Sometimes they fail because the leaders don’t have a common understanding about what the strategy means.  Sometimes it’s because the people who actually execute the strategy didn’t understand it or didn’t understand their role.  Root Learning uses metaphoric visualization and open-ended dialogue to help create a common understanding at all levels of an organization.  We’re excited to have Jim Haudan, Root’s CEO, on the agenda to help us understand how visualization and dialogue can be used to deploy strategy.

Jim has helped over 70 Fortune 500 companies align, deploy, and execute their strategies by using innovative learning technologies to engage their people and create business results.  He has been a partner in assisting many Senior Leadership teams simplify, deploy, and sustain the execution of their strategy. Jim is a frequent keynote presenter on Strategic Employee Engagement.

Jim has a wide range of experience in areas that include global manufacturing, retailing, insurance, pharmaceuticals, health care, information technology, biotechnology, utilities, aerospace, transportation, and education.  He has begun assisting several companies develop truth telling as a key competency.  Jim has also led the development of futuristic visions for both the HR function with a consortium of 25 Senior Vice Presidents of HR at Fortune 500 companies, and with ASTD on the future of Learning and Training.  His client list includes General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Baxter, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Boeing, Harley Davidson, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Maytag, Lufthansa, Pepsi-Cola, PacifiCare, Sears, Babcock & Wilcox, Microsoft, and Takeda.

Root Learning’s unique capability to blend strategy with innovative learning has been the subject of business management articles published in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, The Economist, The Bulletin, Business Finance, HR Executive, and Hong Kong Government publications, among many others.
 
In 1997, Jim was honored as Entrepreneur of the Year in Northwest Ohio.  In 1998, the organization won Sears’ Partner in Progress Supplier Innovation Award—a selection made from a field of 10,000 Sears suppliers.  Root Learning was named a winner of Training magazine’s First Annual Achieving Performance eXcellence (APX) Award in 2003 in the Skills Training category.  HR Executive magazine honored a Root Learning innovation as one of its top HR Training Products of 2002.  Also in 2002, Ameren, a Root Learning client, was awarded the e-Learning Success Stories Award for Gaming and Simulation for its use of a Root product in its Student of the Business program.

In 2005, 2006, and 2007 Root Learning was selected as one of the 25 Best Small and Medium Companies to work for in America by the Great Places to Work Institute.