(on the right)

Dr. Martino was honoured for his exceptional work with Italian companies and for his pioneering work in introducing and developing Business Driven Action Learning in Italy. Consultant and a former executive with competencies in organization design, IT management, and executive development.

Studies: holds a law degree, an MBA, and scholarship from London Business School  (Executive Development Program), Harvard Business School  and Salzburg seminars.

Research:. Many comparative analyses made in his various assignments and sponsored research, on a more systematic manner, as Founding Member of CRORA (Bocconi University) and the Global Council on Organizational Developement  of the Conference Board )

Work Experience: Positions in both private and publicly owned enterprises :
HR manager at Ilva (steel);
faculty member, organization design (OD) at IRI/Ifap Management Centre;
executive at IRI Headquarters for OD and Executive Development;
executive VP at Alenia Aerospace for OD and IT services;
Director of Fiat Management Centre;
Board member of ATI/Alitalia, for four years.

Consulting Experience: Multiyear agreements with leading companies: Coin (retail); Ferrero, Fiat, Finsiel (ITC).

Business Driven Action Learning Experiences. A strong interest for comparative analysis, the stimulating work environment of each job assignment and the multiyear consulting agreements provided excellent conditions to design useful programs to achieve joint benefits for individual and organization learning.
Among those worth mentioning for their business relevance and documentation availability:

- IRI (Romano Prodi sponsored )Programs, supported by the Harvard Business School faculty: one on planning in multi business companies on the the other on the CEO’s agenda. Booklets available.

- Ferrero. On CSR and on Open Innovation. Documents: DVD

- Fiat.  Programs for executives  (Competitive analysis; benchmarking of best practices; High potential programs developed with IMD . Documents: company reports. Described at the first Global Forum (1996) by GP.Bigando and F.Martino.

- Finsiel.  Seven country/sector analysis in USA and Europe. Documents: books.  One program for high potentials with IMD tutorship.

- SME . Six programs sponsored by Employers Association for Italian SME, with field analysis in Europe.

- Single experiences.  Participation with different roles in programs for various clients , both public and private, national and international entities: Boeing (participation), Daimler-Chrysler (faculty member for Italy, run by the Harvard Business School), GE (participation), and Regione Lombardia .

Publications. Editor of a book on Organizational Development, and author of many publications; he is still editing, for over a decade now, the Osservatorio di Organizzazione e Management. 

Lennart Rohlin was born in 1944 and has had a career as an a  publicist, editor and author of numerous books, teacher at Lund University,  professor at Helsinki School of Economics and visiting scholar/researcher at the Harvard Business School. His educational background was in general managemet,  strategy, marketing, organization, leadership and the behavioral sciences. He has some consultancy experience, notably with SIAR which was on the forefront  in research-based consultancy under the charismatic leadership of Eric Rhenman.  But first and foremost Lennart has been a businessman and an entrepreneur. As  an example, he has created the ”most exciting learning environment in Sweden”,  according to the trade media, at six different conference centers by rebuilding  old houses of different origins.  Like Reg Revans, he was also a sportsman: Lennart was on the  Swedish national fencing team for almost 30 years and a member of the team that  won the first ever world championship for Sweden (in 1974). Having been a  bachelor for more than 50 years, he married Ninna in 1996, who has continued to  develop the conference centers as interior decorator, and who gave birth to  Mikaela in 2000 and Melvin in 2003. Lennart´s father was born in 1892, so he is  a connecting link in the middle of three centuries. For 31 years Lennart was Director of MiL and during this time he was one of the founders of Action Reflection Learning and one of its leading practitioners.

Below are some references to MiL and Lennart from some international publications:

Action Reflection Learning. (2008)
(Solving real business problems by connecting learning with earning)
Isabel Rimanocy and Ernie Turner. Davies-Black Publishing. Mountain View, California.

”PRECEDING ARL: THE MiL MODEL
In the late 1970s, a group of professors at the University of Lund, Sweden, met with friends in management positions and colleagues working as consultants and HR professionals in Swedish organizations…This avant-garde group came up with a different way of training that focused on learning rather than teaching….based on three key principles: (1) develop leaders who could thrive on change and were comfortable living with ambiguity and uncertainty; (2) build trusting relationships; and (3) develop learning based on action and reflection, using real-time interventions on current challenges.”  (pp. 137-139)

”THE EVOLUTION OF THE MiL MODEL INTO ACTION REFLECTION LEARNING
In the 1980s, MiL designed and implemented programs to develop value-based leadership, using a design in which learning was based on taking action to tackle real-life organizational issues…This was just the beginning …As the approach evolved and developed characteristics that no longer fit the original Action Learning settings and specifications, the practitioners named it Action Reflection Learning.” (pp.139-140)

Acknowledgment:
”Lennart Rohlin, in particular, has served as a mentor and role model throughout our twenty-one years of doing this exciting work.”  (p. xvi)

Understanding Action Learning. (2007)
Judy O’Neil and Victoria J. Marsick. Amacom, USA.

”While Revans and his associates were spreading his AL concept, similar but separate work was being carried out in Lund, Sweden. Lennart Rohlin was equally disgruntled with the limits of conventional management training in his country. In 1976, he led a group of academics and consultants who were dissatisfied with management and leadership development in Sweden to create their own brand of AL through the Management Institute in Lund (MiL). The group developed an open-ended process that came to be named Action Reflection Learning…. The mindset of MiL involves using all senses to interrupt mental models that prevent managers from seeing the world, and their problems, with fresh eyes and innovative solutions.” (p. 4)

Action Learning Worldwide. (2002)
(Experiences of leadership and organizational development.)
Edited by Yury Boshyk. Palgrave Macmillan, New  York.

”The critical reflection school finds one of its earliest full programmatic expressions in the approach of the Management in Lund (MiL) Institute… established in 1977 by a network of companies, members of the staff at Lund University, various free agents, consultants and people from other universities at the initiative of Lennart Rohlin.… setting its approach apart from classical action learning by emphasizing the synthesis of an action reflection theory through developing a learning community among researchers and managers who are seeking to understand the world through the interaction between theory and practice… Rohlin, Skärvad and Nilsson (1994) developed MiL´s learning principles and extended them to the concept of leadership in a learning society.” (pp. 21-22, chapter by Lyle Yorks, Judy O´Neil and Victoria Marsick).

Managers not MBAs. (2004)
(A hard look at the soft practice of managing and management development.)
Henry Mintzberg. Prentice Hall, USA.

”MiL´s problem-solving approach sounds more flexible than that of Revans. According to Lennart Rohlin (1999), MiL´s founder and president, participants are encouraged to ”create their own … perspectives and theories through facilitated reflection.” MiL, he claims, likes to work with ”paradoxes of management: between action and reflection, order and chaos, the hard factors of human relations and the soft dimensions of business processes”… MiL states its wish to move organizations from ”Employees in hierarchies” to ”Partners in networks” and from ”Authority and control” to ”Empowerment and trust”. This suggests that the kind of management development an organization uses can influence its very assumptions about managing.”