Designing the Smart Organization E-Book

Roland Deiser

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 486

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Filling a gap in the literature, this book offers an innovative interdisciplinary approach to learning for corporate strategic development, linking the domains of strategy, organizational design, and learning. To demonstrate how this process drives the boundaries of the practice way beyond the established notion of simple training and management education, the book is filled with detailed case studies from leading global organizations, including Siemens, ABB, BASF, the US Army, PricewaterhouseCoopers, EADS, Novartis, and more. These studies reveal how large-scale corporations are using the power of dynamic corporate learning approaches to drive innovation, enhance cultural values, master post-merger integration, transform business models, enhance leadership culture, build technological expertise, foster strategic change processes, and ultimately increase bottom line results. For any company that wants to compete in the 21st century, Designing the Smart Organization offers inspiring perspectives for integrating corporate learning as a core business practice that will create sustainable strategic and organizational capabilities.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Figures

Table of Exhibits

Dedication

Introduction

Who This Book Is For

How to Use This Book

Why Corporate Learning?

PART ONE - Conceptual Foundation

CHAPTER ONE - The Corporate Learning Imperative

Five Forces That Drive the Need for Learning

The Learning Challenge

CHAPTER TWO - Enlarging the Framework of Learning

The Nature of Learning

The Dimensions of Learning

The Three Domains of Corporate Learning

CHAPTER THREE - The Integration of Learning with Business Processes

Levels of Learning

Examples of Advanced Learning Interventions

Transforming the Corporate Learning Paradigm

CHAPTER FOUR - Implications for the Corporate Learning Industry

Internal Reconfiguration

External Partners for the Universe of Corporate Learning

CHAPTER FIVE - The Convergence of Strategy and Corporate Learning

The Convergence of Strategy and Learning

The Strategy Process: A Permanent Threefold Challenge

Three Rationales, One Process

PART TWO - Case Studies

Case 1: Innovating Learning Through Design and Architecture (UniCredit)

Case 2: Top Executive Leadership Learning (Siemens)

Case 3: Phoenix from the Ashes: How a Corporate Learning Initiative Reinvented ...

Case 4: Healing Post Merger Chasms: Creating Corporate Values from the Bottom ...

Case 5: Designing Customer Centricity for Multiple Market Segments: The ...

Case 6: Transforming the U.S. Army Through an Informal Leadership Learning ...

Case 7: The Executive Hero’s Journey: Going Places Where Corporate Learning ...

Case 8: Managing the Strategic Asset of Cutting Edge Technological Expertise (EADS)

Case 9: Leadership Learning as Competitive Strategy in the Chinese Market (Novartis)

Case 10: First Choice: The World’s Largest Customer Focus Initiative (Deutsche ...

CASE ONE - Innovating Learning Through Design and Architecture

The Rise of UniCredit

The Creation of the UniManagement Center

Ground Floor: Opening Up Space for Energized Minds

The Art of Learning

Design Details That Create Energy, Dialogue, and Interactivity

The Upper Floor: Rooms for Every Learning Style

The UniManagement Team and the Events

The UniQuest Program

Conclusion: The Strategic Value of Learning at UniCredit

About the Principal of This Case

CASE TWO - Top Executive Leadership Learning

The Historical Context

The Rationale for the Leadership Learning Initiative

The History of Leadership Learning at Siemens

Designing Siemens Leadership Excellence: Concepts, Components, Connections

Launching the Program Amid Fear and Reluctance

More than a Week of Inspiring Insights and Debate

Building Additional Levels of the Program

Ongoing SLE Value Crisis

Conclusion: Leadership Learning as a Strategic Force

About the Principal of This Case

CASE THREE - Phoenix from the Ashes: How a Corporate Learning Initiative ...

The Turmoil at ABB Stotz Kontakt

Infusing New Leadership and a Restructuring

The Origins of the GoBeyond! Team

GoBeyond!’s Intervention at ABB Stotz

A Bright Outlook

Conclusion: The Learning Team as a Strategic Force for Change

About the Principals of This Case

CASE FOUR - Healing Post Merger Chasms: Creating Corporate Values from the ...

Amid Tumult, Birth of the EnBW Academy

The Academy Tests the Waters

Seizing the Moment

Choosing a Unique “Bottom-Up” Process

A Transformed Company

Conclusion: The Corporate Academy as a Strategic Force

About the Principal in This Case

CASE FIVE - Designing Customer Centricity for Multiple Market Segments: The ...

Creating True Customer Orientation: The perspectives Project

Challenges and Lessons Learned

Future Outlook of perspectives

Conclusion: Using Learning to Transcend the Value Chain

About the Principal of This Case

CASE SIX - Transforming the U.S. Army Through an Informal Leadership Learning Network

Creating a Virtual Front Porch

Becoming a Community of Practice

Gaining Formal Acceptance

Blending the Virtual Platform with Face-to-Face Activities

Turning the Social Infrastructure of Learning Upside Down

Further Enhancements

Conclusion: Creating a Learning Architecture That Enables

About the Principal of This Case

CASE SEVEN - The Executive Hero’s Journey: Going Places Where Corporate ...

The Origins of Ulysses

The Aha! Moment

Designing the Program

The Multistakeholder Significance of Ulysses

Creating a Value-Oriented Community

Conclusion: Final Thoughts and Outlook

About the Principal in This Case

CASE EIGHT - Managing the Strategic Asset of Cutting Edge Technological Expertise

Assessing Expert Practices Inside and Out

Launching the Experts Policy

The First Challenge: Defining a Common Meaning for “Expert”

Creating the Expert Ladder

Building Flexibility into the Experts Career Path

The Experts Appointment Process

An Early Dilemma: Can a Company Have Too Many Experts?

Recognizing That Experts Need “People” Training

Getting Experts to Network

The EADS Hall of Fame

Problems and Pitfalls for Managers of Experts

Conclusion: Learning as a Strategic Force at EADS

About the Principals in This Case

CASE NINE - Leadership Learning as Competitive Strategy in the Chinese Market

The Emergence of a Global Industry Leader

Novartis China

Launching the Novartis China Learning Center

The Lure of a Local Mini-MBA

Localizing the Success of Global Programs

Taking the Locals Global

The Impact of the China Learning Center on Novartis

Copying China’s Success

Conclusion: A Lesson of Many Dimensions

About the Principals in This Case

CASE TEN - First Choice: The World’s Largest Customer Focus Initiative

The History of Deutsche Post DHL

Designing the First Choice Architecture

The Process Excellence Framework

Preparation to Launch First Choice Process Excellence

Piloting First Choice

The Employee Engagement Framework: Engaging a Half Million Employees

Managing the Scale of First Choice in DP DHL

Measuring Results

The Outlook for DP DHL

Conclusion: First Choice as a Strategic Learning Intervention

About the Principal in This Case

The Author

Acknowledgements

Index

Table of Figures

Figure 2.1. Expanding the Paradigm of Learning

Figure 2.2. The Seven Dimensions of Learning

Figure 2.3. Domains for Corporate Learning

Figure 3.1. Five Levels of Learning Linking with Business Processes

Figure 3.2. The Impact of Learning Architectures on the Business System

Figure 3.3. Some Tools and Interventions of a Comprehensive Learning Architecture

Figure 3.4. Transforming the Corporate Learning Paradigm

Figure 4.1. Business Needs Determine Learning Content

Figure 4.2. Learning Experiences Inform Business Activities

Figure 4.3. Key External Service Providers in the Extended Learning Universe

Figure 5.1. The Dynamic of the Strategic Process

Figure 5.2. Three Fundamentally Different Rationales Within the Strategy Process

Table of Exhibits

Exhibit P2 .1. Case Study Overview

Exhibit 2.1. The Four Threads of Siemens Leadership Excellence

Exhibit 2.2. Brochure for the SLE Corporate Management Course

Exhibit 2.3 Agenda of the CMC Course

Exhibit 2.4. The Comprehensive Learning Architecture of Siemens Leadership Excellence

Exhibit 2.5 The Five Programs of the Siemens Leadership Excellence Architecture

Exhibit 3.1. Objectives and Outcome of First Management Workshop

Exhibit 3.2. Objectives and Outcome of Fit for Future Kick-off Workshop

Exhibit 3.3 Seven Change Services Offered by GoBeyond!

Exhibit 4.1. EnBW’s Ten Corporate Values

Exhibit 4.2. Values Development Timeline at EnBW

Exhibit 5.1. The Four Cornerstones of BASF 2015

Exhibit 5.2. BASF’s Customer Orientation Strategy Statement

Exhibit 5.3. Reinventing the Value Curve

Exhibit 5.4. BASF’s Six Customer Interaction Models

Exhibit 5.5. The Six CIMs and Their Value Propositions

Exhibit 5.6. The BASF Business Model

Exhibit 5.7. The perspectives Learning Architecture for Maintaining Momentum of Change

Exhibit 6.1. The 3 Cs: Empowering People to Decide the Relevance of Information

Exhibit 6.2. Aligning Formal and Informal Knowledge Domains

Exhibit 7.1. The Ulysses Journey Time Frame

Exhibit 7.2. Organization as Value-Oriented Community

Exhibit 8.1. Key Features of EADS’s Experts Policy

Exhibit 8.2. Flexible Career Paths as Key Element of EADS’s Experts Policy

Exhibit 8.3. The Evolution of Learning and Development at EADS

Exhibit 10.1. Framework of First Choice Architecture

Exhibit 10.2. Five Phases of First Choice

Exhibit 10.3. Six Sigma DMAIC Cycle

Exhibit 10.4. Manager’s Toolkit: Customer Service Themes

Exhibit 10.5. Employee Action Card from “Mistakes” Theme

Exhibit 10.6. Manager’s Toolkit Poster

More Praise for Designing the Smart Organization

“A path-breaking work! Deiser creatively uses learning theory and practice to recast the practice of strategic management and demonstrates the concept through remarkable case studies from ten prominent companies.”

—Larry Greiner, coauthor, Management Consulting Today and Tomorrow and Dynamic Strategy-Making

“Deiser clearly, effectively and accurately points out how organizations must reframe how they design learning processes to thrive in today’s rapidly changing world. A variety of interesting cases show how to do it.”

—Edward E. Lawler III, director, Center for Effective Organizations, USC Marshall School of Business, and coauthor,Built to Change

“A truly insightful book that I highly recommend for any corporate leader, senior executive, or consultant involved in strategy, organizational change, innovation, or HR who is looking to create organizations that last. Deiser makes us not only look at the practice of learning with new eyes, but he also tells a variety of concrete case stories from major global players that flesh out the concepts of this book with great clarity and relevance.”

—Daniel Dirks, executive vice president and global head of human resources, Allianz Group

“Deiser does an excellent job in making us think about learning in novel ways—as an enabler of organizational change, cultural unification, strategic renewal, or just plain survival. Everybody who wants to make a difference in business, government, or other organizational worlds should read this book.”

—Immanuel Hermreck, executive vice president human resources, Bertelsmann AG

We are pleased to offer a free downloadable Instructor’s Manual for Designing the Smart Organization, including sample syllabi, chapter summaries, and additional case study materials, as well as chapter-by-chapter comprehension questions, in-class discussion questions, essay prompts, and PowerPoint slides.

To access the manual, please visit www.wiley.com/college/deiser

Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Introduction

It has become common sense that the competitive success, if not the mere survival, of most of today’s organizations is in large part dependent on their ability to learn, to innovate, and to change on an ongoing, sometimes radical basis. Given this, one might think that the “learning imperative” would have already led to a steep rise in the importance and reputation of corporate learning and development activities as a key strategic organizational practice, on equal footing with finance or marketing and high on the agenda of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

However, in most companies the corporate learning agenda is still struggling to get an adequate voice in the boardroom. The practice of learning does not have a seat at the table when it comes to shaping the business. The Vice President of Learning and Development is usually part of a Human Resource (HR) function that itself suffers in most organizations from a lack of clout and perceived business relevance. The fact that some companies have introduced “Chief Learning Officers” (CLOs) or even corporate universities seems to suggest otherwise, but a little scratching on the surface reveals that, in many cases, it’s just a new label for the old training department.

The primary reason for the ongoing marginalization of learning is that the debate about the value and contribution of learning is driven by a restrictive understanding of the practice, one that has its roots in a “school based” approach to qualification and training. While traditional education and people development remain important, the true challenge large organizations face today is to create and manage enabling architectures that systematically build strategic and organizational capabilities—such as speed, responsiveness, responsibility, innovation, and creativity—into the company’s DNA.

This leads us to a new and ambitious concept of corporate learning that has little to do with the traditional notion of training and education. As a transformational business practice, corporate learning has to leave the classroom and become a business practice, with the focus on initiatives that nurture, develop, and leverage a company’s strategic competence.

To support this argument, we will look at the universe of learning with fresh lenses. We will show that it is not just a back-end qualification process; the very nature of learning is rather about innovation, change, and transformation. Learning is not just about the acquisition of cognitive and technical skills; it includes social, political, and ethical competences. It doesn’t happen only in the classroom—classrooms are actually pretty dysfunctional learning contexts—it occurs everywhere because it is at the heart of our daily struggle to make sense of the world and succeed in complex contexts. And most important, learning is not restricted only to individuals; it is a fundamental process that drives the development of large-scale systems. Using learning to acquire personal skills and insights is great and important. But the learning challenge of the twenty-first century is much greater: How can entire corporations, industries, even societies learn to be more strategically competent systems, so that they will ultimately survive in balance within their relevant ecosystem?

Who This Book Is For

This is not a book just for experts on learning. It is for everyone who has a keen interest in how to shape larger systems in a way that they become flexible, agile, and innovative. As such, the book has relevance for anyone who works in organizations and is faced with the challenge to learn and change. The framework of the book makes it useful for experts and practitioners alike, as it connects conceptual thinking with concrete cases from leading global corporations.

Because the topic of strategic and transformational learning is growing in importance, the book will appeal to senior executives and managers who are involved in the domains of strategy, organization, change, innovation, HR, or general management, especially in large, complex organizations. The concepts and case studies in the book will likely inspire a broad scope of consultants, especially those whose practices focus on strategy, organization, leadership, change management, and innovation. Offering a new and unique contribution to strategic and transformational learning, the book provides a rich source of case study materials for academics, researchers, and students in the field of management science, sociology, and organizational science. It may be used as a textbook to discuss the cases, both in undergraduate and graduate business and organizational behavior courses. It should also be invaluable for those involved in offering executive education and other learning services.

How to Use This Book

The book has two parts that can be read independently. Part One is conceptual; in it I present the arguments for a new perspective on the identity of learning. Part Two contains ten case studies from global leaders that serve as benchmarks in creating organizational learning architectures for strategic innovation and transformational change.

The two parts of the book can each stand on their own, as can each case study in the second part. However, the chapters and case studies are linked to the degree that they reframe the meaning of learning, specifically learning in large-scale systems. When I reflected upon how to allocate space in this book to conceptual considerations and stories from practice, the cases were the clear winners, because conceptual thinking without the lifeblood of practice remains stale and academic. The cases also help illustrate the argument from a variety of angles. However, practice without reflection remains just a story, and the conceptual frameworks presented in Part One help guide thinking. Therefore, the two parts belong together, and you are welcome to read them as best suits your needs.

Chapter One opens with a brief look at some major forces that drive a new “corporate learning imperative”—such as massive changes in the overall business context, the ascent of the knowledge-based economy and society, the changing basis of competitive advantage, the empowerment of the periphery, and the emerging globally networked co creation clusters that require a different approach to strategy and leadership.

Chapter Two responds to this learning imperative by exploring the universe of learning from the perspective of creating an effective business practice. Looking at the phenomenon of learning though three different lenses, we can recognize the current restrictions and the significant future potential of the practice. First, by analyzing very briefly the nature of learning processes, we see that learning cannot be sufficiently explained through the mechanistic model of unilateral knowledge transfer between teacher and student. Learning is an interactive, highly contextual process that leads to new interpretations of the world and creates social fabric. This has significant implications for the design of learning architectures. We then turn to the various dimensions of learning. We investigate not only the cognitive aspect of learning, which is dominant in the educational system, but also the emotional, social, political, and ethical dimensions of the concept and make them practical for corporate use. Third, we look at the critical contributions of learning, extending its traditional focus on people excellence to a new focus on organizational and strategic excellence.

Chapter Three builds on these extensions of the conventional learning paradigm and introduces a hierarchical five step model that integrates learning interventions with increasingly strategic business processes, extending the stakeholder universe of corporate learning to interorganizational networks. By doing so, we can witness the transformation of corporate learning from an educational to a strategic leadership practice. The chapter closes with concrete examples of advanced and unorthodox learning interventions that foster organizational and strategic excellence.

Reframing the identity of corporate learning is not without consequences for the players who serve the field. The conventional set of vendors—business schools, training firms, consultancies, coaches, software providers, and others—naturally reflect in their practices the current paradigm of learning. Chapter Four explores the strategic impact of a redefined learning practice on the various players and the required reconfiguration of the overall customer vendor relationships.

Finally, in Chapter Five, we examine the interplay of the new learning paradigm with the strategy process in large organizations. Like today’s practice of corporate learning, the practice of strategic management must also rethink its traditional planning paradigm, which has become dysfunctional in face of discontinuous change. As a result, we unveil how the two practices converge—learning as a strategic process, and strategy as a learning process.

Part Two of the book presents a collection of case studies of transformational corporate learning adventures from large and complex organizations, most of them global leaders in their fields—organizations like Siemens, ABB, EADS (Airbus), Novartis, BASF, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the U.S. Army, and more. The cases are quite diverse in demonstrating how companies have addressed various challenges they face, but they have in common that they are all large-scale learning initiatives that required smart learning architectures to make the entire system learn. Each of the cases is unique, because each context is unique. But they are also generalizable to situations many companies face, because they all model universal principles about designing learning architectures that go beyond the traditional narrow thinking of what learning can accomplish.

The cases are told as “war stories” rather than polished “success stories” and provide rich material for analyzing the success factors and challenges related to large-scale learning projects. They are examples of ambitious corporate learning endeavors that inspire and challenge the way most of us think about the learning function. They can be food for discourse in the executive suite, and they are great teaching material in executive education programs and business education in general. Together with the chapters in the first part of this book, it is my hope that the case studies will contribute to transforming today’s definition of corporate learning and elevate the practice into the arena in which it deserves to operate.

WhyCorporateLearning?

We all pay lip service to the importance of the educational sector, and at least in the United States we know that our educational systems are in desperate need of repair and innovation. Other books on learning might address the current state of our schools and universities and how they treat learning. Instead, I focus here exclusively on corporate learning.

I do this because the rapidly changing context in which large organizations have to act today puts on them a tremendous learning pressure. Failure to learn is not an option; continuous innovation and reinvention have become imperative for survival. If individuals refuse to learn, they may become unemployable—that’s bad enough. But if large corporations refuse to learn, they can do much unintended harm to themselves and their environment. For the sake of us all, who depend on a healthy economy and on organizations that shape this world responsibly, it is important to raise awareness about the learning imperative. Learning in the comprehensive sense in which I define it is not just a luxury on which we cut back in difficult times. Learning is the lifeblood of sustainable organizational effectiveness and innovation, and done well, it leads to responsible industry leadership.

Further, I believe that any conceptual innovation in learning that is strong enough to transform the practice will be driven by corporations, not by the incumbent players in the learning and education space. Unlike in the academic world, learning in corporations is highly contextual as it is designed for impact. It naturally addresses multiple dimensions and domains of learning. Companies are more likely to realize the limitations of the current paradigm of learning, and as ultimate customers of the education sector, they have the means to drive paradigmatic change.

Finally, corporations—especially large and global ones—are major political actors that create much of the context in which they and we live. As such, they carry a responsibility as global citizens and have ultimately to legitimate their actions. They can become responsible actors only if they gain a better understanding of who they are and how their actions affect the world, and vice versa. The process of continuously developing an understanding of this dynamic is nothing else than the essence of ongoing learning. Unorganized, this learning remains accidental, and organizations miss out on the rich opportunities that come with it. Organized in the form of smart corporate learning designs, this learning enables companies to lead industry transformation by creating a context that benefits the entire stakeholder universe and the larger political and ecological context we all depend on.

PART ONE

Conceptual Foundation

CHAPTER ONE

The Corporate Learning Imperative

We live in turbulent times that are scary and exciting at the same time. It seems that the complex global system of interdependencies we’ve created over the past hundred years or so is suddenly cracking at the seams, creating massive concussions that reverberate throughout the world and challenge the very basis of our political and economic foundations. The leapfrog developments in technology and communications infrastructure open up tremendous opportunities to reshape how we deal with the world, but they are also threatening and potentially destructive if we lag behind in our ability to deal with complexity, assess the systemic impact of our actions, and govern global phenomena. We have to learn as individuals, organizations, and political systems to understand the emerging opportunity spaces and capitalize on them in ways that will lead us to a new quality of a global society in ecological balance with the planet. If we fail to do this, the consequences may be dire.

Corporations—especially large corporations—play a major role in this picture. With their global reach and powerful governance structures, they contribute significantly to the context they—and we all—live in, so they bear an increasing responsibility to act as global citizens. However, they are themselves under pressure to master these turbulences in a way that lets them thrive—or at least survive. They are faced with the imperative to develop new capabilities to more effectively deal with disruptive environments—or even better, to shape them. As in an evolutionary model in which the fittest organisms survive, corporations need to make their ability to learn a core part of their organization’s DNA, so that they can be naturally smart, responsive, flexible, and responsible. If they succeed in doing so, they can keep up with, if not outrun, those changes that might otherwise remove them from existence.

Five Forces That Drive the Need for Learning

The driving forces behind the corporate learning imperative are numerous, and they reinforce each other. Let us explore the five most important drivers that pressure organizations to learn more deeply and in a different way and that force all of us to fundamentally rethink our notion of learning. They are:

• Massive disruption of the business context

• The rise of the knowledge-based organization

• A competence-based view of strategy

• The growing importance of the periphery of organizations

• The transformation from self-contained hierarchical organizations to “flat” and globally networked co-creation clusters

Massive Disruption

We are in the midst of disruptive change. The complex brew of rapidly advancing technologies, globalization, ecological megachallenges, and most recently the global breakdown of the financial markets leaves virtually no industry untouched. Take, for example, the automotive industry, which is slowly but with certainty reaching the end of limitless growth and needs to introduce radically new technologies. Or look at the media industry, which is wrestling with digital copyright issues and the substitution of old media with Internet based models of production, distribution, and consumption. The pharmaceutical industry is being revolutionized through bioengineering and genetic technology, and the energy business needs to transform itself toward clean technologies of generation and consumption. And there is banking, which will not be the same once the dust of the financial crisis of 2008-2009 has settled.

In contrast to incremental change, which we can follow and understand as it emerges from familiar patterns of industry behavior and context evolution, discontinuous change surprises us. It comes out of nowhere, radically reconfiguring and rewriting the rules of the game. Because discontinuous change is so unfamiliar, the new rules are not yet clear; established response patterns are inappropriate; and it is hard to react to it adequately. In the wake of disruptive change, companies that cling to old business models may get destroyed, those who reinvent themselves survive, and new ones that embrace and invent new paradigms create new industry spaces.

Disruptive change that reinvents industries may be scary, but it is part of the game. As the Austrian economist Josef Schumpeter pointed out in his seminal work more than sixty years ago, “creative destruction” is the innovative power behind long-term economic growth and development, and as such it is at the heart of capitalism.1 The pace of industry change through radical innovation may have accelerated recently, but we have seen it before, for instance, with the explosion of groundbreaking inventions that happened within a few decades at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

But disruptive change today is different, because it is striking at more fundamental levels. We are seeing massive changes in the overall social, political, and economic contexts, all at the same time, and on a global scale. The past quarter of a century has been a period of breathtaking turbulence and disruption. The 1980s decade of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher launched emphatic industry deregulation in the Anglo-American business universe, unleashing the power of the free market with all its benefits and ugly excesses. In 1989, we witnessed the fall of the Soviet Empire, ending a period of relative political stability and predictability and adding a further dynamic to the global economy.

In the mid-1990s, the Internet took off, transforming our global communication infrastructure, reframing business to-consumer, business-to-business, and lately also peer to-peer relationships while generating countless new business models in its wake. We saw the burst of the Internet bubble in 2000, which solidified the new medium, transforming the adolescent dot.com craze into a mainstream business reality with a radical impact on all aspects of our lives, comparable to the invention of printing or the discovery of electricity.

Just one year later, in September 2001, we witnessed the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., which led to radical political changes in U.S. policy, resulting in two wars and rekindling religious fundamentalism as a global conflict conduit. The first decade of the millennium also saw the rapid rise of China and India as powerful players on the world stage, reshaping the global balance of trade, reconfiguring the production value chain of most corporations, and taking globalization to a new level.

And now, as we reach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, we witness a breakdown of the global financial infrastructure that is likely to end the period of ruthless Wall Street capitalism and reset not only the way we do business, but the way the global economy—and society—works. At the same time, we are finally starting to realize the seriousness of the ecological challenge that will transform in its own way the foundations of virtually all businesses and our way of life.

All this has happened at warp speed, more or less within one generation. Each and every one of these events has a tectonic quality about it; each hits against the others, and in their combined force, they put an almost inconceivable pressure on organizations to keep pace. The imperative to innovate and reinvent oneself in these changing contexts has become ubiquitous and permanent. The capability to learn is not just nice to have; it has become a key factor for survival—not only for people, but for organizations, industries, and our global society.

The Ascent of Knowledge Based Organizations

But there is more: During the past twenty-five years, the foundations of Western economies have become more and more knowledge based. The value of products and services lies increasingly in their inherent intellectual capital, and knowledge workers are slowly becoming the majority of the workforce. The “rise of the creative class,” as social economist Richard Florida puts it, is slowly changing the texture of Western societies.2

The ascent of knowledge as the strategic lever for value creation has huge consequences for the way organizations deal with this asset. The effective management of knowledge has become a key success factor for competitiveness. Companies need a clear understanding about what kind of knowledge is critical to the business model of the firm—both in terms of marketplace intelligence and internal competence—and they need appropriate policies and mechanisms to acquire, aggregate, and utilize this relevant knowledge.

This is not an easy task for organizations that have been designed to be efficient machines. While some knowledge can be treated like dead material and quickly processed according to an industrial paradigm, the bigger and more relevant parts of today’s knowledge tend to be tacit and ambiguous. This type of knowledge rests in people and in practices and is closely linked with the context where it gets applied. It is harder to access and cannot be “managed” like a database of information. It needs to be absorbed and continuously reevaluated through discourse as it derives from multiple internal and external perspectives. It is of little use if it is not converted into shared meaning and sensemaking organizational maps that then inform the organization’s strategic response.

This leads to yet another knowledge management challenge: how to make strategically relevant information available to the right people in the right place at the right time. How do we involve stakeholders in a knowledge-generating and -disseminating process? And last, not least: How do organizations go about eliminating—or “unlearning”—obsolete or strategically irrelevant knowledge so they do not get overburdened with old and useless stuff?

We can see that knowledge management is much more than the IT-driven craze of the late 1990s that eventually gave the practice a mixed reputation. As John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox’s PARC and a passionate advocate for a new ecology of learning elegantly phrased it: information has a “social life,”3 and if we do not recognize this fact, IT investments in learning and knowledge management fall short. Dealing with organizational knowledge in a way that makes “sense” is a comprehensive learning challenge. It requires a smart social architecture that connects the right people in settings that are conducive to sharing and collaboration, and a technical infrastructure that supports these efforts. Such an architecture may include knowledge-sharing policies, incentive systems, mechanisms to build trust, the encouragement of communities of practice, wikis, and the use of other social networking tools to connect the many internal and external resources that eventually constitute what is considered the real “knowledge.”

Competence-Based Strategic Management

A third driving force that moves learning center stage in the corporation is the recognition that core competences constitute the foundation of a company’s competitive advantage. The paradigm of resource based strategy, which became popular at the beginning of the 1990s through the work of C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel, views the source of strategic advantage not so much as the result of a smart positioning in an existing industry space but in the distinct portfolio of the core competences of the firm.4 Such competences can be brands, hard assets, distinctive processes, technological expertise, distinctive talent, distinctive access to capital markets, and more. They are hard to imitate and constitute the anchor of a company’s identity. A significant part of these competences result from the company’s “DNA,” which often goes back to the founding business idea and is deeply embedded in the organization’s historical practices. But there are also competences that may have been acquired over time, either through mergers and acquisitions, or through internal organizational learning and transformation processes.

The decisions about what competences constitute the core of an organization and how they should be orchestrated and developed lies at the heart of the firm’s strategy and its learning challenge. Core competences constrain the room for strategic maneuvering as the success of new business opportunities depends to a large extent on how well they connect with the firm’s competence portfolio. How companies perceive their core competences has also major influence on the partnership architecture of a firm. The definition of a company’s competence portfolio determines what business activities need to remain within the boundaries (that is, within direct control) of the firm and which ones can be outsourced or delivered by partners in the value chain. The choice is always a strategic one, as it is based on assumptions about which activities can maximize value creation and can best leverage a company’s position in the industry.

The importance of understanding, developing, and nurturing core competences creates a complex corporate learning imperative, beyond the domain of building skill sets. Aligning employee qualification with the strategic goals of the organization is an important element in managing the competence portfolio of an organization. But people-oriented “competence management” alone does not sufficiently address the larger learning challenge. Equally important is the smart design of structures and mechanisms that build and reinforce the core competence of the organization. Here, corporate learning must help create a strategic discourse about the industry dynamics, the company’s capability base, and the business opportunity spaces that result from linking the two. This requires the design of dedicated spaces that foster learning about the company and about its environment, through smart and honest interaction with internal and external stakeholders. In other words, ensuring and leveraging a company’s core competence requires learning activities that are closely connected to the strategy process, transcending the current role of the corporate learning practice.

The Growing Importance of the Periphery

The accelerating change in the corporate environment has a significant effect on the leadership capabilities required by an organization. Processes that require the formal involvement of several functions and multiple internal layers of control are not only slow and tedious, they create a culture of inertia and blind obedience to rules. While these processes may work in stable and predictable environments where rules don’t change, they become dysfunctional in a fast-changing context that requires entrepreneurial spirit, flexibility, and real-time response. Large corporations that are hamstrung by lengthy internal processes and a culture of silos have a significant disadvantage compared to small and nimble competitors who don’t have to make their way through a jungle of red tape. To remain competitive, large corporations have to let go of steep hierarchies and central control and instead empower the periphery of the organization. Decision power and operational leadership need to move to the external boundaries of the firm, places that are in direct touch with the real world.

Empowering the periphery is a massive learning challenge for large organizations. It requires a major reset of the cognitive maps of executives, managers, and employees alike. The top must learn to let go of operational control and become instead a body that provides identity and overall strategic guidance. The key role of senior leadership is to create the right organizational architecture that encourages entrepreneurship, strategic discourse, and cross-functional collaboration. Corporate learning can play a major role in reshaping the mindset from a command-and-control mentality to a primarily enabling role that creates an environment where the periphery can thrive.

Middle management that was accustomed to playing a role as transmission belt between the orders from the top and the execution at the bottom must become entrepreneurial. They need to learn to make their own decisions, challenge senior leadership with creative inputs they receive from the environment, collaborate across boundaries without previous approval, and lead in a spirit of responsible semi-autonomy.

Employees who have learned to accommodate themselves to a command-and-control culture that rewarded obedience and blind execution need to become decisive and take action when dealing with customer complaints, process flaws, or quality management.

And this is just the people part of the equation. Empowering the periphery also requires the design of enabling organizational mechanisms and policies that help create the desired leadership culture. It requires a learning architecture that facilitates the interplay of responsibilities along the vertical and horizontal lines of the organization and that helps capitalize on the learning opportunities that result from a larger and more consciously managed interface with the market.

The Emergence of Globally Networked Organizations

Smart companies have a deep understanding of how they can achieve optimal leverage by keeping value-generating activities for themselves while entering into partnerships and alliances for noncore activities. Focusing on the core and partnering for the noncore has organizational consequences that again put a learning pressure on companies—and this time a pretty complex one: Organizations need to learn to let go of operational control of non-strategic activities and learn to act successfully in networks.

Giving up control is a major challenge, one that has little to do with teaching knowledge or skills but with developing the social and political abilities to orchestrate a company’s stakeholder universe. Many of the activities that were formerly performed within the boundaries of the firm are no longer controlled by only one player; they require now the collaboration of a complex network that often is dispersed all over the world and may include hundreds of players. In globally networked organizations, a firm’s competitive advantage lies not so much in being the “best,” but in its ability to co-create with others and to orchestrate this process of co-creation in the most efficient and effective way.

Performing within an interdependent network of equals requires different strategic and operational leadership skills than those used in a hierarchically controlled organization. The traditional leadership model of command and control works fine within the boundary of each organization of the network, but hierarchical power does not work between the members of a network that co-creates. The interplay between the players needs horizontal coordination and adjustment processes, and these follow the logic of leading without formal power.

In addition, a network is only sustainable if its members can create an overarching win-win architecture that provides enough value for each of them to stay committed to the network. With the exception of rare monopolistic relationships, the members of a co-creation network are typically involved in many different value-chain webs that may compete or collaborate or both. Leadership and influence in the network is not a function of formal authority, but a function of the ability to provide maximum value for the entire community of players. The most successful companies will be those that can position themselves best in the battle for premium customers, suppliers, and other network partners and that understand how to optimize processes and profitability for the entire network instead of only for themselves. While such an optimization process requires investments and commitments from all stakeholders, it also creates a sustainable network with a sense of joint ownership of the space and a high degree of mutual value-chain integration.

Given this trend, the corporate learning challenge of globally networked organizations involves nurturing the company’s competence portfolio while at the same time helping to build a hard-to-beat collaborative network architecture. Developing the organizational capability to lead successfully as a network player is the basis for competing successfully in the new “flat world.” The challenge is to create a learning process that emphasizes the development of the communicative and collaborative abilities of the organization in favor of the traditional unilateral treatment of external stakeholders.

This challenge extends the reach of the learning function beyond the boundaries of an organization. Any learning architecture that fosters interorganizational collaboration needs to include the stakeholders that are members of the collaborating network. Corporate learning must reach out to customers, suppliers, alliance partners, or regulators and design an enabling learning environment for the entire value web. Successful stakeholder orchestration, designed as an ecological space that helps a network improve its collaboration, is an invaluable capability that helps secure industry leadership.

The Learning Challenge

The five issues reviewed in this chapter force organizations and their leaders to fundamentally reframe their mindsets and rethink the way they operate today. They create a comprehensive learning imperative that demands much more than just the usual training and development efforts. The new learning questions are:

• How can we create organizational structures, systems, and cultures to cope with the new realities? How can we create robust designs for dealing with massive change?

• How can we exploit the potential of disruptive change as a learning opportunity?

• How can we excel in orchestrating the generation, distribution, and sharing of relevant knowledge across the internal and external boundaries of the organization?

• How can we improve our understanding of the core competences of the organization? How can we improve our understanding of industry dynamics and emerging opportunity spaces that allow us to leverage our competences? How can we enable an ongoing discourse about the resulting strategic rationale?

• How can we empower the periphery of the organization to improve our ability for real-time response? How can we design the outer membrane of the organization in a way that maximizes learning from and with our external stakeholders?

• How can we design learning spaces for the organization that help us to perform as leaders in a horizontally networked world? How can we help orchestrate the external stakeholders of our organization in a way that maximizes the value of the entire network?

These questions open up an exciting and novel universe for corporate learning. But capturing that universe comes with a significant challenge: how to transform the practice of corporate learning itself so that it can effectively respond to these learning imperatives.

The current identity of the corporate learning field is too narrow and restricted to take on this challenge. With its focus on HR processes and people qualification, corporate learning today provides an important contribution, but this role covers only a fraction of the full range of learning imperatives on the horizon. The forces we have discussed require responses that reach far beyond the domain of the traditional human capital practices—responses that address the way organizations operate and strategize, the way they do business. What is required are creative strategic learning interventions that not only shape the texture of their own corporation but have the potential to touch the external stakeholder universe as well.

The mission of a new and comprehensive corporate learning approach is to gently redesign the system—how it works internally and how it deals with its external environment. Its task is to help organizations and their people develop an understanding of their core competences, assist in creating the right networks, enable these networks to excel in co-creation, and find ways to best leverage the company’s position within its stakeholder universe. Learning needs to create spaces of strategic discourse among stakeholders inside and outside the organization; it needs to “teach” horizontal leadership. It must encourage internal and external collaboration and then support that collaboration with intelligent, elegant organizational designs. In short, corporate learning has to become an organizational architect that helps anchor system capabilities in a way that makes corporations not only economically successful but also ethically responsible players in this globally interdependent economic, political, and ecological space.

Getting corporate learning to this point may sound ambitious if not impossible to achieve. However, when we take off the mental blinders that restrict us to a traditional notion of the learning domain and look more closely at the potential of a wider vision of learning, new paths open up that allow us to start reframing the identity of the practice and embark on a journey of strategic transformation of the corporate learning industry.

Notes

1 Schumpeter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper, 1975. [Originally published 1942].

2 Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

3 Brown, John Seely, and Duguid, P. The Social Life of Information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2000.

4 Prahalad, C. K., and Hamel, Gary. “The Core Competence of the Corporation.” Harvard Business Review (May/June 1990): 79-91.

CHAPTER TWO

Enlarging the Framework of Learning

Most of today’s learning activities in large organizations happen in more or less sophisticated settings that focus on the qualification of the workforce and the development of leadership bench strength. These activities are driven by an honest commitment to learning that goes to great lengths to excel, but they are a poor response to the larger corporate learning imperative. They follow a narrow paradigm of learning, one that takes its identity from the institutional educational sector at large, with its focus on individual qualification. Consistent with this paradigm, learning is usually perceived as the domain of the HR function, tasked with employee skill development. Frequently acting remote from the business and struggling to get a voice in the boardroom, corporate learning is one of the weaker stakeholders in the power game of business functions. It comes as no surprise that when times get tough, learning is often the first to see its budget cut.

To master the learning challenges outlined in Chapter One, we need to look at the notion of corporate learning with new eyes and extend the current paradigm of the practice beyond its traditional boundaries. This chapter makes the effort to reframe our lenses to get a different, more comprehensive view of learning—both as a phenomenon and as an instrument to enhance capabilities. We will do this by looking at learning from three angles.

First, we examine the nature of learning. The common notion is that learning happens through the transfer of knowledge or information from experts and teachers to learners. This perspective does not do justice to the complexity nor to the important social implications of learning. It takes learning out of the individual and social context and treats the process as a mechanistic transaction.

A different, more appropriate approach is to conceive of learning as an interactive, highly contextual process. To help readers of this book understand the far reaching implications of this view, we briefly review in the first section of this chapter some elements embedded in the nature of learning that make it a powerful transformational force.

Second, we explore the dimensions of learning. The current educational system in the Western world is almost obsessively focused on the intellectual, cognitive, and analytical competences. This obsession is closely linked with the dominant paradigm of scientific inquiry designed around the rational explication of the world and resulting in a mechanistic approach to dealing with it. While the emphasis on linear rationality has been the dominant way of Western thinking since René Descartes, we know that the cognitive domain is only one part of the equation—and not always the most important one.

The intellectual genius who blooms in secrecy has no impact on the world; he needs to act and get “in touch” with his environment. The expert who is not able to communicate her expertise to others in an inspiring way remains dry and boring. The smartest analysis of consulting firms remains moot if it is not put into practice in a complex web of corporate power dynamics. In other words, just being smart does not cut it; creating impact on our environment requires emotional, social, and political competences that enable us to make things happen in a context of competing interests.

Furthermore, acting blindly in our interest without a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of systems and the long-term consequences of actions stresses the balance of systems and is ultimately destructive. To assure our long-term survival, we need to put knowledge and what we can do with it into the context of moral responsibility and universal ethical standards. To get a better grasp of these multiple dimensions that learning has to address, we separate them analytically and look at each of them in more detail.

Third, we examine the three domains that corporate learning needs to address as a core practice for assuring an organization’s ability to compete in complex and fast changing environments: people excellence, organizational excellence, and strategic excellence. We all agree that there is no great organization without great people, but the best people cannot unfold their potential if they are hamstrung by poor organizational structures and cultures. People excellence and organizational excellence are two sides of one coin that need to be addressed together if they should come to life. But even great organizations with great people are doomed to failure if they rest on their laurels or rely on their previous successes. This is where strategic excellence comes into play—the ability to continually challenge the rules of the game, transcend existing business models, and orchestrate the organization’s stakeholder network in a way that leverages the firm’s core competences. The third section of the chapter analyzes the three domains and shows the potential contributions that corporate learning architectures can provide to build and nurture all these abilities.

Figure 2.1.Expanding the Paradigm of Learning

Examining learning from these three angles opens up a new universe for corporate learning and allows us to envision new development paths for its practice. Figure 2.1 illustrates the three directions learning can take.

The Nature of Learning

One of the most limiting constructs of learning starts with the assumption that information and knowledge are context independent and can be mechanistically transferred from the teacher into the student. We then measure the effectiveness of the transfer through tests and compare the student’s knowledge before and after the learning intervention to assess if something has been learned. In this model, effective learning is defined by creating as little loss of information as possible. This mechanistic view perceives the student as a passive vessel into which the teacher funnels content. This model does not consider the specific context of the student, nor does it consider the context of the learning situation.

However, the nature of learning is that it is completely context dependent. Not only does the student bring his or her own context to the learning situation, the essence of learning happens through the social context of the learning situation itself. We cannot dig deep here into this fundamental issue, which is the subject of major discourse in philosophy and social sciences, but we will quickly cover some conceptual cornerstones of learning because they provide the basis for most of the frameworks that follow suit.

Learning Is Context Dependent

Except in very early childhood, learning never happens on a clean slate. Learning always happens in a context, no matter whether we read a book, listen to a speech, search the Internet, or discuss with friends or colleagues. Whatever the “true” reality may be, we always see the world through a cognitive and emotional filter that has been shaped by our previous experiences. We need these mental models and frameworks to make sense of the world. When we “learn,” we connect new information with that which we already have and interpret this input on the background of our own history, which is our personal context. There is no objectivity in the world of human communication; whatever we learn, it is always biased and subjective, according to the specific context in which we think and live.

Relevant Learning Happens by Encountering Difference

Relevant learning happens through our daily encounter with the world, through our experiences and the interactions we have with people. As people always bring their personal histories and backgrounds to the table, each encounter is necessarily a meeting of different mindsets and different interpretations of the world. Encountering new and unfamiliar perspectives or situations shakes up the mental and emotional models that help us structure the meaning of the world. They are a threat to the old and familiar, and as such, they irritate us. However, such differences and irritations are the very source of learning. We learn where the familiar meets the unfamiliar, where different lenses to see the world collide, and we have to create a new and common meaning.

Differences of perspective are nothing that needs to be suppressed; on the contrary, if we would all know the same, think the same, feel the same, and had the same interests, no learning and no development would happen. However, we do have the tendency to negate differences or to “solve” them through unilateral power. While this may be necessary in order to act efficiently in our daily operations, it destroys the learning potential of irritation.

The art of designing great learning contexts is to optimize the degree of difference and irritation. If there is nothing new to experience, there is little to learn. But the same happens if there is too much difference—if you teach high school content to a first grader, even the smartest cannot learn. Creating “designed spaces of irritation” is at the heart of the learning practice, no matter whether the space is a classroom, an organization, or a business process.

Learning Creates Social Fabric

When people who have different perspectives meet, they both learn if they let their differences reframe their view of reality. But they learn not only as individuals; the process of negotiating different worldviews creates also a shared experience and constitutes a social relationship between the parties. In other words, meaningful learning creates a social fabric that connects the participants in a new way. Great learning designs recognize the power of this process and treat the creation of relationship networks that happen through integrating diverse perspectives as a goal that is often more important than the topical learning content.

Structuring the learning as mere knowledge transfer, in which the expert talks and the audience listens, wastes much of the rich potential of the interactive process. A restricted notion of learning that is based primarily on a one-way transfer of knowledge may have its role in a narrow realm of skill training and fact-based learning. But to fully exploit the nature of the learning process, the teacher student relationship needs to morph into a discourse of equals who bring different perspectives to the table, with the expertise of the “student” being as serious a contribution to the learning process as the expertise of the “expert.” To create real learning, a “teacher” needs to become rather a facilitator of a joint discovery of insights among various worlds of experience than a feeder of prefabricated knowledge pieces.

The Role of Boundaries to Demarcate Context

The diversity of perspectives does not always lead to learning and the development of productive social fabric—it may even lead to the opposite. We can see this on the individual level, when a person has a hard time letting go of prejudice or a certain mindset; it is even harder when we deal with larger scale systems whose “frames of reference” are petrified in organizational structures and routines and in the way they do business. Systems have a natural tendency to close their boundaries to preserve their identity. They perceive “the others” as threat to their interests, and they naturally resist putting their established frames of reference to the test.