Book Excerpt: Learning in Action

CIO — Creating a learning organization sounds good in theory. Try to find an executive who wouldn't like more collaborative, innovative and knowledgeable workers, and a backbone of clearly defined, cost-cutting best practices. But putting the learning organization theory into practice is difficultespecially when it comes to leading this type of sweeping enterprisewide change. So how does one even begin creating the learning organization?

In his new book, Learning in Action: A Guide to Putting the Learning Organization to Work, Harvard Business School Professor David A. Garvin examines the challenges facing executives as they move toward creating and sustaining the learning organization, and offers real-world techniques and tools to help managers implement these new processes. Though Garvin notes acceptance of the learning organization model has been high, progress toward achieving the end has been slow. "Learning organizations have been embraced in theory but are still surprisingly rare." What to do? "If executives hope to build learning organizations, they too must become more open to divergent views, more aware of their personal biases and more comfortable with raw, unfiltered data. "Otherwise," Garvin explains, "they will never be able to lead others in learning."

Today managers and leaders are considered to be very different. Managers are action oriented; they spend their days doing, delegating and deciding. Their eyes are on the present, and they measure success by skilled execution and effective implementation. Consistency and stability are the primary goals.

Leaders, on the other hand, focus on the future; they spend their time setting targets, developing strategies, communicating vision and aligning individuals and departments. Change is the primary objective, and the challenge is to get all parts of the organization moving in the desired direction at a rapid enough rate. Clearly, companies need both managers and leaders to succeed, for together they ensure attention to both short- and long-term goals.

Yet enduring success requires that both groups broaden their horizons. Both need to add a new goal, "improving organizational learning," to their already lengthy agendas. Superior intelligence gathering, experiential learning and experimentation are all required. Otherwise, atrophy and drift are inevitable. The challenge is great and becomes ever more pressing with time.

It is for this reason that learning is the key to long-term survival and growth, and that organizational effectiveness is so intimately linked to adaptability and flexibility.

Scholars have responded to the need for adaptable, flexible learning organizations by suggesting that executives devote more of their time to teaching. As one expert put it: "An organization cannot become a learning organization without first becoming a 'teaching' organization." To that end, executives are urged to share their distinctive perspectives about their companies' strategies, purposes and values. They are told to develop a "teachable point of view" that captivates and enlightens, communicating it to employees through stories and parables. They are instructed to lead management development sessions in which they share their own successes and failures and diffuse their favored approaches throughout the organization. Such prominent CEOs as Roger Enrico of PepsiCo, Jacques Nasser of Ford and Andy Grove of Intel have taken up this challenge, spending weeks of their time in face-to-face meetings with direct reports and other high-potential managers. There, they tell war stories, describe their personal philosophies and teach others to use their favorite tools and techniques.

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