Intelligent Manufacturing € May € 1996 € Vol. 2 € No. 5

Building a Learning Organization

While over two-thirds of senior executives continue to hold out hope for traditional performance improvement measures like TQM and reengineering, over 70% say building a learning organization holds the most promise for sustained business results, according to a survey of more than 300 top U.S. managers conducted by Arthur D. Little (Cambridge, Mass.), an international consulting firm. The survey also reports corporate leaders placing blame for disappointing improvement efforts most frequently on a lack of senior management commitment (60%), a failure to involve and educate employees (56%) and reward systems not aligned to improvement goals (50%).

"Senior executives are increasingly accepting their role in leading change and recognizing the amount of knowledge resident in their people," noted Ranganath Nayak, leader of Arthur D. Little's Learning Organization Task Force. "Employee knowledge can't be boiled down into a process; it has to be nurtured, shared and captured."

Calling the emerging interest and investment in building an employee knowledge base "evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary," Charles LaMantia, president and CEO of Arthur D. Little, added, "Companies are beginning to manage employee learning as a critical business process. Long-term company success and growth is about people improving and people innovating."

Respondents overwhelmingly link a company's ability to create its future with the key role employees play in the success equation. In fact, the top reason for building learning organizations, according to respondents, is to accomplish business goals by capturing the collective attention and intelligence of employees.

Companies most often cited as valuing learning and fitting the description of a "learning organization" (a company known for investing in employee learning with bottom line results and continuous proof of its ability to improve and innovate in the future) include such manufacturers as General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Motorola.

At their own companies, 42% of the respondents say they have appointed a learning task force or chief learning officer, and 64% say they have changed their personal management style to involve employees in the business mission of the company.

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