Organisational learning – fashion or necessity in the 21st century business?
For over 15 years now, organisational learning is an important topic, both in business teaching and practice.
Everyone is aware that continuous improvement via learning represents crucial point in the development of core competencies, making the seminars on organisational learning and his «Big Brother» knowledge management sprouting up all over.
Leading consulting businesses and business schools are loading companies with near mystical definitions of learning organisations as places «where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free and where people are continually learning how to learn together. »/Peter Senge (1990): «The Fifth Discipline», NY: Doubleday, p.1/
However, such reverential and utopian ideas have shown as a hard framework for practical action. What companies miss, as the scholar David A. Garvin states are the «gritty details of practice». Many of the companies are effective at creating and gaining new knowledge (ex. Balanced Scorecard, Total Quality Management), however the number goes down on the companies succesful in applying that knowledge to their particular activities. Even business schools that teach such knowledge are failing the test of implementation.
Nevertheless, there are companies that we can consider champions of translating new knowledge into their strategic and operational behavior. Some of the examples are: Xerox, Honda, GE.
Why and how do some companies succeed in implementing new knowledge?
The answer to that and many other relevant questions is given in our organisational learning seminar. Inspired by the examples of those champions at translating new knowledge into practice, we would like to show you ways in which continuous improvement can represent a crucial core competency.
The seminar is designed for top and middle managment, entrepreneurs and everybody who considers knowledge as the investment for the future and not just as the cost item in the current P&L statement.
