Building an Innovative Learning Organization

Chapter 1Why 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 ...