Company Learning Rate - The ability to learn creates the future
Article Summary
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| John S Veitch |
| The Network Ambassador |
We have this idea that we can be successful by building an innovative company. Surely this is the key to building an "Open Future ©".
Sadly the evidence for success in this common business strategy is weak. No company can change at the speed of the market.
Companies that are led by, "big men" tend to be the least able to adapt.
Competitive advantage is always short lived. In this sense, no business is sustainable.
Foster and Kaplan took as a sample the 500 companies chosen by Standard and Poor for the S&P Index in 1957. Forty years later only 74 were left.
Wiggins and Ruefli found that high performance was virtually always short lived. Of 6772 companies, only 5% performed well for ten years or more.
Open systems have a diversity of activity no firm can emulate. (No firm could tollerate such a high rate of failure.)
Many people are working hard to make their own visions "real". Maybe 90% or more of them fail.
Failure, that follows a good try, generates new learning and the opportunity to succeed another day. That's the innovative engine driving an open market.
Where this work occurs outside of the company, the costs of learning and failure is also external. The knowledge gained is also beyond the firewall.
Most of the people engaged in this sort of activity are members of at least one community of practice. They will occasionally talk about their work.
Communities of practice may be sources of new ideas, of expertise, a place to find new employees, and sometimes the source of a new product or service.
This is our age of enlightenment, and the pressure of life in cities, the rubbing together of many life strands, produces increased creativity and innovation.
There is a hot-house of ideas on the Internet, in social networks and communities of practice. Join to bring "the enlightenment" to your company.
By definition diversity requires, overlap, redundancy, free time, excess capacity, the resources to experiment, and the freedom to fail.
Train and develop prepared minds. Use the existing public networks. Run private groups too, but don't reinvent the wheel, use the open system.
Engage many people in intense debate and innovation. Create or encourage the development of internal "hot-houses".
Find people who are natural leaders of such groups and use these groups to drive learning and cooperation. This is the engine for innovation and change.
There are well tried action learning processes that every executive should know, and every firm should master.
If you need the original article it's here.
