Selker Leadership

Spencer Clark recently retired as Chief Learning Officer of Cadence Design Systems Inc., the industry leader in the electronic design automation space. In this role he built Cadence University to drive global implementation of technical, professional, executive and leadership development. He was also responsible for implementing an organizational development practice within the Cadence culture and the development and integration of an explicit talent development program into the Cadence succession planning process.

He is currently an Executive Director of EDA Networks where he is responsible for facilitating the Chief Learning Officer Forum, a network connecting senior executives responsible for enterprise-wide learning and development with their peers in other leading companies. This network is designed to take learning & development to the next level at a time when it’s increasingly common for companies to view talent as a major source of competitive advantage.

Spencer’s background is a blend of practical business experiences combined with a strategic formal education in support of his professional objectives. He has earned roles as President, Chief Operating Officer and General Manager with Fortune 100 companies including General Electric, Litton Industries and Black & Decker, as well as serving small privately run companies.

Committed to facilitating people in the process of their professional development, Spencer has acquired additional expertise in the deployment of 360° feedback programs, change management, and executive coaching.

For the five years preceding Cadence, he was President of his own consulting company using his skills to improve the performance in a variety of industries and disciplines, including Power, Defense, Human Performance, Security, and Manufacturing.

Spencer holds degrees in mathematics and physics, an MBA, an Executive MBA, and is an accredited Professional Nuclear Engineer. He has completed GE’s prestigious multi-year Leadership Development Program at the Crotenville Learning Center. The Crotenville experience became Spencer’s inspiration for his recent role as CLO of Cadence and the foundation of his enduring passion to contribute to the building of great companies.

Spencer is a member of the Board of Directors for the Zhongguancun-Cadence Institute of Software Technology, the Advisory Board for Leavy School of Business Santa Clara University, Board of Directors for Project Hired Inc, RFI Enterprises.

For the complete interview with Spencer Clark click here Spencer Clark Complete Interview

In this candid conversation, Spencer shares his views on what companies need to do to prepare and deal effectively with the upcoming workforce shortage.

Greg Selker: In 1998, McKinsey published the report “The War for Talent” – and that was a pretty extensive study, as I’m sure you remember.

Spencer Clark: I do. And I happen to know a bit about Axelrod too. So we’ve had the pleasure having a conversation around some of that research.

Greg Selker:  It was pretty seminal piece of work at that point, and it says that the most important corporate resource over the next twenty years will be talent – smart, sophisticated business people who are technologically literate, globally astute and operationally agile. And what I’m struck by in reading that report is that what McKinsey pointed to perhaps was only the fringes of what was to come. And I’m very interested in what your thoughts are on the war for talent and how it has affected you and your organization?

Spencer Clark: I think most of what they said was right, I’m not sure that I agree with everything. I certainly agree with the requirements for the talent that is needed and becoming more sophisticated than it was. And that the supply is going down. There’s another great work by Ken Dychtwald, Tamara J. Erickson, and Robert Morison called “Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills And Talent.” It’s about the demographics of what’s happening with the workforce and the speed with which people are now retiring because the baby boomers are going out of the workforce – or at least partially going out. And I can’t recall the exact numbers, but she also talks about the number of new jobs that are created – and the percentage of them that are required to have a college level degree and the number of our kids that are actually finishing college and getting a degree. There’s like a 20 or 30% miss on those. You add the two together and it looks like half of the new jobs being created won’t have domestic people available to be able to fill them. So the numbers are just staggering, and the crossover was late in 2006 – so we’re beginning to enter it.

I saw another study that said only 14% of the HR people are doing anything about this – less than 40% of them even recognize it as a problem. So my first reaction is it will be a catastrophe before we really recognize how big a deal it’s going to be.

Greg Selker:  So what do you see that could be done from a leadership position as either an HR executive or business executive to forestall this catastrophe or produce a different outcome?

Spencer Clark: There are two things. All corporations are in the education business whether they want to be or not. So knowing how to develop your talent is going to be a key thing for corporations. If you don’t have – and these are my numbers and I’m making them up from my belief system, but if you’re a half a billion dollar business and you don’t have a strong and developing learning and development organization – I think you’re going to be in trouble.

 Second thing is that these corporations must learn how to capture some of the great minds in other parts of the world. And that means knowing what they need. For example at Cadence, we were at $1.3 billion dollars in revenue with only software when I left. When we looked for the kinds of people that we needed to write code, we found that for the analog people they were in Russia. They have people with those skill sets. So we set up relationships with the top five technical universities in Russia and we’re now shipping a lot of our code writing to Russia in the analog studies. We know that there’s a different set of strengths in China and a different set of strengths in India, but the question I would ask is what are you doing to identify where those kinds of minds are that you need to have and how are you going to export that work to them. So the skill with being able to both identify and to move it is important.

Greg Selker:  It also sounds like what you’re saying is, once you have identified those people and recruited them into your organization that there needs to be some significant commitment and resources that are made available to continually develop those individuals so they are retained.

Spencer Clark: Yes, that’s right. Because you talk about it being such a fast moving world, one report that I read said that we’ll change careers about seven times during our work life. If that is the case then you’re not going to stay very long in any one of them. So the skills that you have when you’re graduated and enter the workforce simply won’t stay. At Cadence we found that even with a Masters degree, most new graduates weren’t ready to be contributing engineers. We set up under Cadence University a six month program in Austin just to move them from what they had at the Masters level to being able to begin to contribute as a software engineer for us.

 So our entry level employees right out of college with a Masters in electrical engineering or computer science weren’t at the level we needed them to be in order to be productive quickly. We found their time-to-productivity was between 30 to 36 months. If we hadn’t recognized this and put a mechanism in place to get them up-to-speed, our services and products would have been slower to market. Time to market is one of the key differentiators between success and failure in this industry. This means corporations must have the capability of continuing to develop their people.

Greg Selker:  When you have a university that is set up within a corporation, what do you see as the ideal mix in terms of focusing on expansion of functional skills versus expansion of overall leadership and management skills and competencies?

Spencer Clark: Well you know that I grew up in GE, and one of the things that I think makes them strong is that they have a belief that everyone should have general management capabilities. So even if you’re in Research & Development, you are taught general management skills, most everyone can read a P&L statement, a balance sheet. So I believe in the holistic approach and what I’m doing now that I’ve left Cadence and working with Align Technology, is we’re building general management capabilities.

 Right now we’re focusing on the top 36 people of the company. First of all we’ve done the competency work to know what we need. Now we’re going through and doing general management assessments and we’re running week-long simulations to give them at least management awareness if not skills. So they understand the impact of their decisions on the broader organization. I think that’s a key thing, but that’s making the assumption that you’re functionally competent. So there are basic blocking and tackling skills that you have to have in each of your functions. If you’re in IT and you don’t understand enterprise systems, then obviously you’re not going to be successful. Or if you’re in manufacturing and you don’t understand “just in time” inventories or the latest in automation, then you’re not going to be successful.

 So you have to continually do those refresher “skill buildings” as a function, but I think the key to it is having appreciation of what an entire organization looks like – or what the entire business looks like. If you’ve got a top person who can’t answer very succinctly the question, “How do we make money here?”, then I don’t believe that person is contributing as well as he or she should be. So I think these are the responsibilities of leaders and their people.

Greg Selker:  It all comes back to leadership – doesn’t it Spencer?

Spencer Clark:  Leadership matters.

For the complete interview with Spencer Clark click here Spencer Clark Complete Interview

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