Because We Want Superior Performance
Often it seems that the essence of management in the West is to extract ideas from the heads of people at the top of the organization and place them into the hands of people at the bottom.
Managers talk about it in different ways. Some say they want to build high-performance organization or gain competitive advantage. Others talk about total quality management, fast cycle time systems, self-managing work teams, empowered organizations, improving their innovation and productivity, finding core competencies, or building learning organizations.
No matter what words they use, they are all really describing different facets of the same fundamental purpose: to marry the individual development of every person in the organization with superior economic performance.
To Improve Quality
Again and again we have found that organizations seriously committed to quality management are uniquely prepared to study the "learning disciplines."For Customers
Xerox Canada monitors some of the copiers it sells through a telecommunications link. If a machine isn't working right, technicians replace it for free -- often before the users of the machine have noticed any problems.To offer this service, Xerox had to be more than competent. They had to bring together people from throughout the company -- marketing, research and development, technology, customer service, logistics, sales, purchasing, and accounting -- in service of a common purpose.
For Competitive Advantage
In the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your organization's ability to learn faster than its competition.Arie de Geus, the former Coordinator of Group Planning at Royal Dutch/Shell, who articulated this idea in the late 1980s (Planning as Learning, Harvard Business Review, March/April 1988.), explains it this way: "Any insight or innovation, whether it is a new way of marketing, a new product, or a new process, is really a learning process. At Shell, we saw we did not have to be too secretive -- provided we were not standing still. If we continued to learn and generate new ideas, and incorporate them into our work, then by the time anyone had copied us we would be that much further along."
For an Energized, Committed Work Force
Without learning about the business, as well as their own tasks, employees cannot make the contributions that they are capable of.To Manage Change
People in learning organizations react more quickly when their environment changes because they know how to anticipate changes that are going to occur (which is different than trying to predict the future), and how to create the kinds of changes they want.
For the Truth
In many cases, the most senior executives are the most eager of all to see the freedoms to speak the truth tale hold. Now they can say, "I don't know the answer. and I have faith that we'll figure it out."
Because the Times Demand It
During the next thirty years, cutting-edge technological changes will spin out into everyday life. The important of economies of scale may diminish. Factories might produce autos on Monday, refrigerators on Tuesday, and Robots on Friday. New types of energy and communications grids will contribute to reshaping the political structure of local communities. People in learning organizations will be able to look forward to creating, instead of merely reacting to, the new world that emerges.
Because We Recognize Our Interdependence
Today, the most critical threats are slow, gradual processes to which we have contributed ourselves: environmental destruction, the global arms race, and the decay of educational, family, and community structures. These types of problems cannot be understood, given our conventional ways of thinking. It have to be at the level of collective thinking and understanding -- at the level of organizations, communities, and society.
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