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Leveraging the Power of Knowledge

Market champions keep learning how to do things better, and keep spreading that knowledge throughout their organization. Learning provides the catalyst and the intellectual resource to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Organizations obtain competitive advantage from continuous learning, both individual and collective. Learning by the people within an organization becomes learning by the organization itself. The changes in people's attitudes are reflected in changes in the formal and informal rules that govern the organization's behavior.

Create Your Future

Knowledge is most productive when it is shared by all. A learning organization, wrote Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline, is "an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future". It is continuously learning new ways of doing things and also (necessarily) involved in a continuous process of forgetting old ways of doing things.

JIT-Style Learning and Training

The best kind of quality oriented learning (and training) is just-in-time-style learning, that is, learning that happens on the job, knowledge which is applied immediately as needed, and learning by doing. The sooner you can apply the material you learned, the better you will understand it and the longer it will be retained.

Innovative e-learning services create new opportunities for such on the job JIT-style learning and training. In particular, the first-ever Ten³ online Business e-Coach provides most effective JIT-style e-learning opportunity which is available free anytime to anybody.

There is No Failure, only Feedback

The presupposition 'there is no failure, only feedback' is at the heart of the learning culture of the neuro linguisting programming (NLP). To hold this presupposition means to treat every situation, every moment, as an opportunity to learn and to gain some new choices and flexibility. This helps the team members to improve continuously both personally and as a business.

Organization as a Set of Interconnected Subsystems

Organizations work as a set of interconnected subsystems, says Senge, so decisions made in one part of the business have implications for the other parts. Managers, therefore, need to embrace the complexity of organizations rather than embracing "the pervasive reductionalism" of western culture, whereby simple answers to complex questions are always sought.

A non-threatening dialogue needs to be carried out among the employees of an organization in which some sort of consensus is reached as each employee comes to see the points of view of all the others, and begins to learn from them.

The Five Learning Disciplines

The five "learning disciplines" identifies by Peter Senge are described as the basis of "learning organization work". They are:

1. Personal Mastery. Expecting people to develop their personal capacity to meet their own objectives, and thus those of the company, which in turn is organized to encourage that personal effort.

2. Mental Models. Developing the right "mind-set" to guide actions and decisions.

3. Shared Vision. Commitment of all members of the organization to its aims and its ways of achieving those objectives.

4. Team Learning. Exploiting the fact that group thinking is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

5. Systems Thinking. Acting on the understanding that actions and decisions cannot be isolated, but have ramifications throughout the organization.

Case in Point: Sharing Knowledge - the Microsoft Approach (more)

Bill Gates is clear that high individual knowledge is not enough in today's dynamic markets. A company also needs a high corporate IQ - intelligence, knowledge, and expertise of the company - which hinges on the facility to share information widely and enable staff members "to build on each other's ideas". This is partly a matter of storing the past, partly of exchanging current knowledge. "We read, ask questions, explore, go to lectures, compare notes and findings... consult experts, daydream, brainstorm, formulate and test hypotheses, build models and simulations, communicate what we're learning, and practice new skills," says Gates... More

Case in Point: British Petroleum - the Power of Corporate Learning

John Browne, CEO of British Petroleum is an outspoken enthusiast of the power of corporate learning. "From his perspective, learning provides the catalyst and the intellectual resource to create a competitive advantage²". Browne has developed an action plan for competitive corporate learning (see the table on your left) to spur changes in people's attitudes and ultimately formal and informal rules that govern the organization's behavior...More

Bibliography:

1.    "The Fifth Discipline", by Peter Senge, 1990

2.    "NLP Solutions", by Sue Knight, 1999

3.    "The Road Ahead", by Bill Gates, 1996