Building an Innovative Learning Organization

A Framework to Build a Smarter Workforce, Adapt to Change, and Drive Growth

Russell Sarder

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119157472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Institute a culture of learning to boost organizational performance and agility

What makes organizations successful? Today, most successful companies are learning organizations. Building an Innovative Learning Organization shows you how to join their ranks and bring your organization up to the head of the class. This book is a practical, actionable guide on how to boost performance, successfully manage change, and innovate more quickly. Learning organizations are composed of engaged, motivated employees who continually seek improvement, which leads to organizational agility and the ability to innovate ahead of the curve. When you encourage learning at every level, from the intern to the C suite, you gain a more highly skilled workforce with a greater ability to act in any situation.

Building an Innovative Learning Organization shows you how to create this culture in your organization, with detailed explanations, practical examples, and step-by-step instructions so you can get started right away. Written by a recognized thought leader in the training industry, this informative and insightful guide is your roadmap to a more effective organization. You will discover how to:

• Attract, retain, and motivate the best employees
• Become a more innovative and agile organization
• Create a culture of continuous self-improvement
• Encourage learning at all levels and translate it into action

Learning and education doesn't end at graduation—it's a lifelong process that keeps you relevant, informed, and better able to achieve your goals. These same benefits apply at the organizational level, making the culture self-sustaining: learning organizations attract top workers, who drive the organization forward, which attracts more top workers. If you want the best people, you have to be their best option. Building an Innovative Learning Organization gives you a blueprint for building a culture of learning, for a stronger, more robust organization.

Chapter 1
Why Become a Learning Organization?

With tougher competition, technology advances, and shifting customer preferences, it's more crucial than ever that companies become learning organizations. In a learning organization, employees continually create, acquire, and transfer knowledge—helping their company adapt to the unpredictable faster than rivals can.¹

—David Garvin

We constantly hear about the success of Google, which has topped Fortune's best companies list for the past five years, where job applicants beat down the door to get in. We may not know as much about the other companies on the magazine's Best 100 list, such as Allianz Life Insurance Company, SAS, Edward Jones, and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. What we do know is that, like any successful organization, for-profit or nonprofit, corporate or private sector, those organizations have this in common: They understand the value of learning.

The fact is that organizations don't succeed by staying the same. The landscape is littered with companies like once hugely successful Blockbuster. When Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September of 2010, the prevailing theory was that it had been put out of business by Netflix or was a victim of the recession. In reality, Blockbuster put itself out of business. It went under because it failed to keep up with the changes in technology that gave customers options for the way they accessed film entertainment. Decision makers said, “Blockbuster is never going to go out of business. The Internet is too weak, too slow. There's not enough bandwidth.” Yet, in the same difficult economy, Netflix thrived. The reason? As technology and customer preferences changed, Netflix looked ahead and was able to adapt.

Those lessons are everywhere. In Good to Great to Gone: The 60 Year Rise and Fall of Circuit City, Alan Wurtzel, son of Circuit City founder Sam Wurtzel, describes the collapse of one of the first and most successful big-box stores. At its peak, Circuit City had more than 700 stores and annual sales of $12 billion. But facing growing competition from upstarts such as Best Buy, Circuit City's management stubbornly held on to the business practices that had made it successful, unable or unwilling to change its business model to meet its customers' changing needs.

It's happening today. Amazon.com and Google hope to disrupt the package delivery business with drones that can drop packages right on your doorstep, bypassing UPS and FedEx. The Wall Street Journal quoted a UPS representative who said, “There remain numerous reasons why drones are not a feasible delivery method at this time.”² No one denies that drone technology isn't there yet and regulations still need to be put in place. But it seems more than possible that those obstacles will be overcome sooner rather than later, and when that happens, today's package-shipping companies could very well find themselves going the way of Blockbuster.

It could happen to us all.

Key Changes That Affect Success.

Change comes in various forms. Our business models and strategies, which may have worked just fine for years, may no longer keep us relevant in the face of a global economy and changing customer preferences. We can no longer count on a stable, malleable workforce, because today's workers are quick to change jobs in search of new opportunities. Technology is changing so rapidly that we almost have to run in place to keep up, and we must keep up to stay ahead.

Changes in Technology

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without…talking about the other.³

—Bill Gates

Seven Technology Trends

In a recent survey, GlobalWebIndex found that adults now spend close to two hours a day on social media.⁴ Google processes more than 1 billion search queries every day. Every minute, more than 100 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube—that's more content in a single day than all three major U.S. networks broadcast in the last five years combined. Facebook transmits the photos, messages, and stories of more than 49 billion people, almost half of the Internet population and a fifth of humanity. The Wall Street Journal projects that 28 billion devices—ranging from wearable devices to vehicles—may be connected to the Internet by 2020.⁵

Technology is changing the way we live, the way we work, the way we communicate, the way we get our information, and the products and services we want and need. We can compete only by anticipating and keeping up with the technology and leveraging it to drive our businesses. Today, that means understanding the potential impacts of seven technology trends: mobile, social, the Internet of Things, 3-D printing, big data, the cloud, and security.

Mobile

The hundreds of thousands of people in Times Square on New Year's Eve 20 years ago were using cameras with film to snap their photos of the big event. Now they all hold smartphones and send their photos across the world in a few seconds. My nephew in Bangladesh, a developing country, uses Skype on his phone to call me for advice about girls he meets on Facebook, which he also accesses on his smartphone. Apple recently released the Apple Watch, freeing customers of the need to reach into their pockets every time they want to make a call, check their e-mail, or do any number of other tasks. Tablet computers make it possible to write, read, and edit documents anywhere, at any time, without the need to lug around a laptop. All these mobile devices are having an earthshaking impact on the way we live, work, and do business.

Social

Survey after survey suggests that we spend a significant percentage of our waking time on social media. Think about what will happen a few years down the road when just about everyone has a smartphone, a smart watch, or some mobile device that hasn't even been invented yet. Everyone will be connected with everyone else, in all corners of the world. What will that mean for the way we do business? The way we run our workplaces?

The Internet of Things

Several of my friends use a wearable fitness tracker called Fitbit. You might even wear one yourself. Almost 11 million of them were sold in 2014 alone.⁶ Fitbit is part of what's called the Internet of Things, which essentially means anything that is connected to the Internet, which will increasingly include almost everything we use, from appliances to cars to medical devi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Building an Innovative Learning Organization
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Why Become a Learning Organization?
• Chapter 2: Building a Learning Culture
• Chapter 3: Developing a Learning Plan
• Chapter 4: Setting Learning Goals
• Chapter 5: Creating Competency Models
• Chapter 6: Selecting the Right Learning Methods
• Chapter 7: Assessing the Results of Your Learning Plan
• Chapter 8: Managing Your Organization's Learning Operation
• Chapter 9: Call to Action!
• Learning from Experts: Excerpts from Sarder TV Interviews
• Partial List of Chief Executive Officers, Chief Learning Officers, Chief Information Officers, Authors, and Thought Leaders Interviewed by Sarder TV
• References and Resources
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement