The Learning Organization
The relevance of learning within an organization is recognized by most companies as being crucial to their long-term interest. Yet, even the most savvy, knowledge-based organizations do not dedicate any significant portions of their budgets and corporate energies to this critical activity. At a leading Manhattan investment bank a couple of years back, I got a blank look when I enquired as to how bankers exchanged learnings from a particular deal they had worked on.
Implementing an effective knowledge repository is the single most important investment that would allow knowledge-based organizations to navigate inevitable business cycles and staff turnover with their expertise intact long after the individuals working on a specific assignment, deal or project have moved on. It would allow people with diverse strengths and backgrounds to contribute their expertise and/or experience most effectively on issues, problems or challenges facing the organization as a whole. It would break down the barriers of divisions, groups, hierarchies and other forms of corporate structure or other factors restricting participation of employees across the organization.
To set up such repositories of knowledge and related systems for organizational learning is, therefore, not just important, but crucially urgent, for all organizations concerned about business continuity, growth and development of expertise.
