Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics and Ecology, Revised Edition

Innovative Learning

Learning: the departure

Individual or organizational learning of the vertical kind involves a departure and a return (see figure 13.1): the departure begins with adventure and ends with creativity; the return begins with vision and ends with action. Both involve successively different combinations of behavior, thought, and feeling. We shall illustrate these learning processes through references to Comino, as the individual learner, and to Krisson and Dexion as models of the learning organization.

The adventurous role: the physical transaction

Comino responded to the call to adventure, as a first, physical step, when he left his job in a large company because he wanted to set up on his own. Not only did he venture into the unknown, without a burning idea to drive him on, but he started his business just before the Great Depression.

You can do it!

Hunting around for something to do, Comino, a first-class graduate in mechanical engineering, set up his printing business in the heart of London through a series of accidents. Because of his Greek roots he had some Greek friends who happened to be in the cigarette business. They needed their paper and packaging to be printed. So he started with two or three machines in a basement in Oxford Circus. Because of his location there he ended up doing jobbing printing for the rag trade³.

Figure 13.1 Dexion's molecular structure ...