Marcia Conner
 Vice President for Enterprise, Pistachio Consulting

Marcia L. Conner

Marcia Conner works at the intersection of enterprise social messaging and workplace learning, focused on the trends, markets and dynamics shaping a distributed, collaborative and multi-generational organizational culture. Former Vice President and Information Futurist for PeopleSoft, coauthor of Creating a Learning Culture: Strategy, Practice & Technology, cocreator of Pistachio Consulting's Enterprise Microsharing Comparison, she writes the Fast Company column Learn At All Levels. She is a fellow of the Society for New Communications Research and the Batten Institute at the Darden School of Business. She offers an insider's perspective on the fields of enterprise technology, online community building, social networking, human capital development, distributed leadership and cognitive design. Her latest book, The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media, will be out in May 2010.

As an advisor to public and private sector organizations, she leverages her experience operating high-speed organizations to spur personal and professional growth. She has served Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield, IBM Lotus, Central Intelligence Agency, FedEx, the Gap, Verizon Wireless, American Express, The Home Depot, WD-40, CARE, SocialText and other global employers.

As a keynote speaker, Marcia talks with groups throughout the United States and abroad on turning social media and learning into competitive advantage, microsharing for macroresults, overcoming organizational learning disabilities, catalyzing the new digital learning style, and aligning education with dynamic business goals.

As a thought-leader, Marcia's learning and leadership columns reach millions of readers in print and online. She authored Learn More Now: 10 Simple Steps to Learning Better, Smarter & Faster (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), cocreated Creating a Learning Culture with Jim Clawson (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and contributes to dozens of publications including Leading Organizational Learning (Jossey-Bass/Leader to Leader Foundation, 2004) and Engaging Learning forward (Pfeiffer, 2005). The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media, will be out in May 2010 from ASTD & Berrett-Koehler. She has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, CIO Magazine, PCWeek, Information Week, Business 2.0 and has appeared on ABC World News This Morning.

When PeopleSoft hired Marcia to integrate technology and learning across the enterprise, she grew Education to become the fourth most profitable learning organization in the world. She built programs including PeopleSoft University to support 100% annual sales growth through client, business partners and employee training. These efforts increased revenues by $26 million and customer satisfaction ratings by 30%. She founded the ERP industry's first usability center, and was responsible for the design strategy, user experience and learnability for PeopleSoft's R& D project code-named Disruptive.com, innovating next-generation enterprise software and online service business communities in the PeopleSoft Business Network (PSBN).

Learning in the New Economy magazine, which Marcia co-founded and led as editor-in-chief, gained a loyal readership of 250,000 C-level business leaders. The magazine received acclaim from The Wall Street Journal, Business 2.0 and Fortune for making learning a hot topic among executives.

At Microsoft, she developed the company's first new employee training program, accelerating employee readiness from 6-months to 6-weeks. Her training organization delivered classes to thousands of employees in under a year.

She is a fellow of the Batten Institute at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia, a Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research, co-founder of the Learnativity Alliance, develops leadership programs for women worldwide and volunteers her time to talk with teachers and parents about creative solutions for children who have learning disabilities.

She has lived and worked on three continents, and currently lives on a 50-acre homestead in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley with her husband Karl Conner and their son Clarke. On Twitter, she is @marciamarcia.