Learning Organization Quotes & Sayings

There are three kinds of feedback and organizations must utilize all three to be effective:
1. Evaluation. This rates you against standards and peers. It lets you know where you stand.
2. Coaching. This information helps you get better and learn. It is an engine for learning.
3. Appreciation. Most desire for feedback is usually for appreciation. It motivates us. — Sheila Heen

Every time I come across learning items of interest, I'll send distribution voice mail to the appropriate group in the organization. — Fred DeLuca

Instead of focusing on getting more resources, tipping point leaders concentrate on multiplying the value of the resources they have. When it comes to scarce resources, there are three factors of disproportionate influence that executives can leverage to dramatically free resources, on the one hand, and multiply the value of resources, on the other. These are hot spots, cold spots, and horse trading. Hot spots are activities that have low resource input but high potential performance gains. In contrast, cold spots are activities that have high resource input but low performance impact. In every organization, hot spots and cold spots typically abound. Horse trading involves trading your unit's excess resources in one area for another unit's excess resources to fill remaining resource gaps. By learning to use their current resources right, companies often find they can tip the resource hurdle outright. What — W.Chan Kim

Become a "learning organization". Shuck your arrogance - "if it isn't our idea, it can't be that good" - and become a determined copycat/ adapter/ enhancer. — Tom Peters

You cannot have a learning organization without shared vision. Without a pull toward some goal which people truly want to achieve, the forces in support of the status quo can be overwhelming. — Peter M. Senge

To be successful in a knowledge economy firms need to create learning organizations. — Don Tapscott

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization BY PETER M. SENGE — Daniel H. Pink

Once a company has adapted to a new environment, it is no longer the organization it used to be; it has evolved. That is the essence of learning. — Arie De Geus

An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage. — Jack Welch

Our behavior is driven by a fundamental core belief: the desire, and the ability, of an organization to continuously learn from any source, anywhere; and to rapidly convert this learning into action is its ultimate competitive advantage. — Jack Welch

A person and an organization must have goals, take actions to achieve those goals, gather evidence of achievement, study and reflect on the data and from that take actions again. Thus, they are in a continuous feedback spiral toward continuous improvement. This is what 'Kaizan' means. — W. Edwards Deming

We need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. It's not about making learning happen; it's about letting it happen. — Sugata Mitra

Learning is limited by an organization's ability to keep its people. — Tom DeMarco

Individual learning, at some level, is irrelevant for organizational learning. Individuals learn all the time and yet there is no organizational learning. But if teams learn, they become a microcosm for learning throughout the organization. Insights gained are put into action. Skills developed can propagate to other individuals and to other teams (although there is no guarantee that they will propagate). The team's accomplishments can set the tone and establish a standard for learning together for the larger organization. Within — Peter M. Senge

Teams that focus on learning from failure outperform those that don't, but not everyone works in an organization that takes the long view. — Sheryl Sandberg

The [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind. — Steven Pinker

We may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them cannot read or write. This but partially expresses the fact. They are ignorant of the world about them, of modern economic organization, of the function of government, of individual worth and possibilities, - of nearly all those things which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from learning. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Thinking is computation, I claim, but that does not mean that the computer is a good metaphor for the mind. The mind is a set of modules, but the modules are not encapsulated boxes or circumscribed swatches on the surface of the brain. The organization of our mental modules comes from our genetic program, but that does not mean that there is a gene for every trait or that learning is less important than we used to think. The mind is an adaptation designed by natural selection, but that does not mean that everything we think, feel, and do is biologically adaptive. We evolved from apes, but that does not mean we have the same minds as apes. And the ultimate goal of natural selection is to propagate genes, but that does not mean that the ultimate goal of people is to propagate genes. — Steven Pinker

When you attack your fellow "Americans" out of "HATE" no matter what organization or race you belong too, you have attacked America. It's called Homegrown Terrorism. If you loved America, you would not attack your fellow Americans out of barbarity. Learning "PEACE" is a condition of the heart. Peace is not possible without forgiveness. Un-forgiveness destroys, forgiveness heals. — Henry Johnson Jr

Teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. This is where the "rubber stamp meets the road"; unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn. — Peter Senge

[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people. — Jane Jacobs

response to intervention (RTI) is our best hope to provide every child with the additional time and support needed to learn at high levels. RTI's underlying premise is that schools should not delay providing help for struggling students until they fall far enough behind to qualify for special education, but instead should provide timely, targeted, systematic interventions to all students who demonstrate the need. To achieve this goal, we remain equally convinced that the only way for an organization to successfully implement RTI practices is within the professional learning community (PLC) model. — Austin Buffum

High performance leaders capitalize on crises to galvanize the motivation and actions of people in the organization. — Andy Hargreaves

It's objective evaluations that give our hardwiring principles teeth and drive the organization toward results that last. — Quint Studer

What we need is not more learning, not more eloquence, not more persuasion, not more organization, but more power from the Holy Spirit. — John Stott

We should conduct ourselves so that wisdom will grow. Our organization's structures should be designed to facilitate learning at all levels, in all areas, even if at first we don't see the relevance. Professional development opportunities including seminars, university programs, special project teams, and mentoring programs are just a few examples of structured learning. — Franz Metcalf

Many organizations are now trying to walk under the banner of The Learning Organization, realizing that knowledge is our most important product ... But the only place that I've seen it is in the Army. As one colonel said, "We realized a while ago that it's better to learn than be dead." — Walter Wriston

Wherever the Net arises, there arises also a rebel to resist human control ... A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often. It is ... fertile ground for learning, adaptation, and evolution ... The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All other topologies limit what can happen. — Kevin Kelly

Try this: Identify a bottom-up improvement or innovation in your organization, and interview the person who championed it. Chances are you will find a hero story of some kind. Why do we have to be heroes to implement perfectly good ideas? — Alan G. Robinson

By forcing a substantial elevation in collective aspirations, stretch goals can shift attention to possible new futures and perhaps spark increased energy in the organization. They thus can prompt exploratory learning through experimentation, innovation, broad search, or playfulness.38 There — Charles Duhigg

Learning is a process whereby a human being, or group, or organization, or society comes to understand and embody nature's patterns. — Tom Johnson

It takes us long to learn that prayer is more important than organization, more powerful than armies, more influential than wealth and mightier than all learning. — Samuel Chadwick

A goal of education is. to assist growth toward greater complexity and integration and to assist in the process of self-organization - to modify individuals capacity to modify themselves. — Reuven Feuerstein

An organization filled with honest, motivated, connected, eager, learning, experimenting, ethical and driven people will always defeat the one that merely has talent. Every time. — Seth Godin

What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how, in conjunction with television, it undermines the old idea of school. Who cares how many boxes of cereal can be sold via television? We need to know if television changes our conception of reality, the relationship of the rich to the poor, the idea of happiness itself. A preacher who confines himself to considering how a medium can increase his audience will miss the significant question: In what sense do new media alter what is meant by religion, by church, even by God? And if the politician cannot think beyond the next election, then we must wonder about what new media do to the idea of political organization and to the conception of citizenship. — Neil Postman

By 2000, the rate of GIS development had risen above the normal growth trend of institutional management skills. This means that systems are now more capable than people, and the ordinary incremental growth rate in skills within an organization does not keep up with developments in technology. Recently, the relative curve of GIS development has leveled off somewhat, but management still has a lot of institutional learning to do before truly making use of the full capabilities of GIS. — Roger Tomlinson

Corporations, in the name of efficiency, suppress variation by "getting all the ducks in line."To optimize productivity, they evolve highly refined and internally consistent operating systems. Payoff - results - as long as the music lasts. But ... all that streamlining and re-engineering limits diversity, suppresses self-organization ... and curtails a bottom up emergent response to disruptive change. — Richard Pascale

People cannot be expected to learn one expertise and just apply it routinely in a job. Your expertise is in steadily renewing your knowledge base and extending it to new areas. That lifelong cycle of learning really is the foundation of the new information organization and economy. — George Gilder

A learning organization is an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future. — Peter Senge

Art isn't about drawing; it's about learning to see. What organization doesn't need this ability? — Edwin Catmull

We should not expect the Church as an organization to teach or tell us all of the things we need t know and do to become devoted disciples and endure valiantly to the end (see Doctrine and Covenants 121:29). The moral agency afforded to all of Father's children through the plan of salvation and the Atonement of Jesus Christ is divinely designed to facilitate our individual and independent learning, acting, and, ultimately, becoming — David A. Bednar

The pattern recognition theory of mind that I articulate in this book is based on a different fundamental unit: not the neuron itself, but rather an assembly of neurons, which I estimate to number around a hundred. The wiring and synaptic strengths within each unit are relatively stable and determined genetically - that is the organization within each pattern recognition module is determined by genetic design. Learning takes place in the creation of connections between these units, not within them, and probably in the synaptic strengths of the interunit connections. — Ray Kurzweil

Learning organizations organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together. — Peter Senge

I am involved with 'Write Girl,' which is such a great organization, because they go into inner city schools and work with underprivileged girls to pair them up with other writers. And it gets them learning to express themselves and become familiar with their own voice. They have a 100% success ratio getting those girls into college. — Melissa Rosenberg

Just because you are CEO, don't think you have landed. You must continually increase your learning, the way you think, and the way you approach the organization. I've never forgotten that. — Indra Nooyi

New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works ... images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations. — Peter Senge

We have reached the end of problem solving as a mode of inquiry capable of inspiring, mobilizing, and sustaining human system change. The future of Organization Development belongs to methods that affirm, compel, and accelerate anticipatory learning involving larger and larger levels of collectivity. — David Cooperrider