• This section of the book written by David Garvin portrays the essentials of a person’s learning process within an organizational learning environment. According to him, “Learning is the most natural of activities.”

  Definition of Organization Learning: A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, interpreting, transferring, and retaining knowledge, and at purposefully modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.

  The Learning Process

  1. Expansion of one’s horizon
  2. Acquisition of new perspectives, abilities and skills
  3. Continuous adaptation and growth through time
  4. Self-directed learning projects
  • Occupational skills (accounting, short hand and tool design)
  • Specific job knowledge (advertising strategy and needs of the disadvantaged adults)
  • Personal Interests (cooking skills, child and baby care)
  5. Company-sponsored education
  • Corporate universities
  • Educational requirements of companies among employees

  
  Apprehensions and views of managers and executives towards learning:

  1. Challenge in developing a culture that values learning.
  2. "New Age" phenomenon (goal is releasing human potential)
  3. Stability and predictability of companies
  4. Learning has yet to establish a secure beachhead at many corporations
  5. Corporate learning is much more likely to be practical, applied and intimately linked to the bottom line.

  
  Effects of Inadequate Organizational Learning:

  1. Due to slow and inadequate learning, a steel manufacturer had total lost contribution from delays at US$137M.
  2. A study of intra-firm transfers of manufacturing technology found that over 50% experienced severity problems due to insufficient training.
  3. Much of the displacement of companies occurred in the semiconductor industry as it shifted from vacuum tubes to semiconductors to microprocessors.
  4. Flaws in Intel’s Pentium processor due to a design error in the chip. This caused the firm a US$ 475M write-off.

  
  These examples involve seemingly unrelated challenges such as (i) installing new equipment, (ii) transferring best practices, (iii) responding to technological changes, (iv) interpreting customer feedback. Each illustrates the difficulties of effective implementation and, by implication, the power and potential of improved organization learning.

  • Common Denominators for the success of a firm
  • Improved learning has direct links to the bottom line (cost and revenues)
  • Managers seldom use the term learning when describing situations
  • Corporate success is best judged by adaptability and flexibility, not the usual short-term measures of profitability and productivity.

  
  Tests to know if an entity is a learning organization:

  • Does the organization have a defined learning agenda?
  • Is the organization open to discordant information?
  • Does the organization avoid repeated mistakes?
  • Does the organization lose critical knowledge when key people leave?
  • Does the organization act on what it knows?

  
  Steps to building a learning organization:

  1. Identify the most pressing business challenges and greatest business opportunities.
  2. Know the topics or issues to learn to meet the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities.
  3. Know how to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills.

  
  In each case, the most effective learning strategy depends on the situation. There is no stock answer, nor is there a single best approach. But by focusing on these steps, managers are taking an important direction: they are agreeing that learning can be managed. New knowledge need not materialize by magic, not through sweeping metaphors or grand themes. The roots of learning organizations lie in the gritty realities of practice.

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