Leonardo Award

Leonardo Company Transformation: A holistic approach to company training

The Leonardo "Company Transformation" award distinguishes personalities who implement a holistic approach of innovative thinking in specific areas of "Corporate Learning" that other companies and professions feel inspired by. This can be in regard to knowledge and talent management, knowledge partnerships, training and e-learning concepts, lifelong learning combined with merits in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and intercultural cohesion.

Calvin Grieder

Calvin Grieder
CEO Bühler AG (till 2016)

Excerpt of the explanatory statement of the Leonardo Ambassadors:

At Bühler, the core vision of product development and projects, as well as the approach in educational technologies and corporate learning, are not merely connected but actually form integral parts of a company policy based on utmost responsibility towards customers, stakeholders and employees alike. Our Swiss ambassador Peter Palme and our member of the steering board Professor Winfried Sommer gave us sound reports on programs such as ClassUnlimited, conducted under the auspices of your colleague Christof Oswald and your Head of Professional Learning, Andreas Bischof. The blend of keeping to the traditional values of dual education and daring to include outstanding technological innovations, following the vision of a classroom without geographical borders, is indeed impressive. Although still limited in scale, the program does not follow popular trends to boost technical hypes to prove one’s own innovativeness. Instead, it combines the demands for sober technical training of very high profile with the opportunities provided by cutting edge technologies. It is about creating an atmosphere for and with multicultural participants to co-work and co-learn in a sphere that is enhanced by state-of-the-art technologies without taking on the form of anonymous cyberspace.
  
These achievements are highly valued, indispensible preconditions to master "company transformation" in the "Leonardo" sense. In order to unfold the true potential, they need to be embedded in Bühler's corporate culture. Bühler is a family-owned company famed for having not just been a pioneer in innovative business but also for historically being deeply rooted in social obligations, introducing labor health care insurance at an early stage, building houses for workers and caring for those that are part of the enterprise. Supporting this heritage and developing it in a multicultural global context, while keeping the five Bühler essentials of "Trust, Recognition, Respect, Involvement, Passion", is a process you personally were entrusted with as CEO and now as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

For you, it is a prerequisite to foster a culture of mutual understanding and awareness of diverse environments in production and learning infrastructures in order to enable highest competitiveness around the world. It comes as no surprise that you take a stand in the current debates on openness and freedom not just for goods and services but also for the movement of people.
                   
Helping to master and carefully manage the challenges in this family-rooted company in difficult global economic times, thereby envisaging it as a learning organization to actively promote vivid change, is the impressive achievement attributed to you, which the international advisory board sees as a fulfillment of Leonardo’s spirit to which the prize feels obliged.”