Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roland Deiser is the founder and executive chairman of the European Corporate Learning Forum (ECLF) and serves as a senior fellow at the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication. He is an internationally recognized expert on strategy, organizational design, and innovation, with a focus on building strategic capabilities into large-scale systems. His professional work is strongly rooted both in both academia and practice.

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Designing the Smart Organization
 
Increased competition in the international marketplace and the volatile and ever-changing economic landscape have put the spotlight on corporate learning as a business function that can help determine and sustain long-term business success.
 
Written by Roland Deiser-an internationally acclaimed expert on building strategic capabilities into large-scale systems-Designing the Smart Organization outlines an innovative paradigm of corporate learning that can help any organization achieve remarkable results. In this groundbreaking book, Deiser abandons the traditional thinking about corporate learning and redefines it as the core engine for building sustainable "strategic competence" into the DNA of a firm. Thus corporate learning becomes an indispensable enabler of continuous strategic innovation and change.
 
Designing the Smart Organization provides a framework for a more comprehensive and strategic perspective of the corporate learning agenda that puts special emphasis on integrating learning interventions with the strategic process of the firm. To demonstrate how this process drives the boundaries of the practice way beyond the established notion of simple training and management education, the book is filled with case studies from leading companies and organizations including ABB, EADS, Siemens, Novartis, BASF, Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, and the U.S. Army. These studies reveal how leading large-scale and cutting-edge global corporations are using the power of dynamic corporate learning approaches to drive innovation, enhance cultural values, master post-merger integration, transform business models, build technological expertise, foster strategic change processes, and ultimately increase bottom-line results.
 
For any company that wants to compete in the twenty-first century, Designing the Smart Organization offers inspiring perspectives for integrating corporate learning as a core business practice that will create sustainable strategic and organizational capabilities.

Aus dem Klappentext

Designing the Smart Organization
 
How breakthrough corporate learning initiatives drive strategic change and innovation
 
Roland Deiser
 
Praise for Designing the Smart Organization
 
"Without any qualification and only with heartfelt enthusiasm, this book should be read immediately by every leader in every institution. My excitement is based on three profound contributions that Deiser's book offers: 1) the single best argument and summary of 'organizational learning' and its significance, 2) ten brilliant and powerful case studies which illustrate his concepts and tremendously practical action steps, 3) this book is especially useful right now in these times when all organizations are facing uncertainty, chaos, and crises. What could be more important to organizational systems and their leaders than to learn, adapt, and recover from these setbacks!"
-Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business at the University of Southern California, author of On Becoming a Leader, and coauthor of Transparency and Judgment
 
"A smart, useful book; but it is more than just that. With logic and examples, Roland helps us realize just how much we must regrind our lenses for seeing how deep learning can naturally happen in an organization if we just move beyond traditional notions of corporate training and re-conceive learning as a strategic imperative. I highly recommend this book for any corporate leader who wants to succeed in a rapidly changing world."
-John Seely Brown, independent co-chairman, Deloitte Center for the Edge; former chief scientist of Xerox Corp and director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); and coauthor, The Social Life of Information and The Only Sustainable Edge
 
"[This book is] filled with knowledge and insight about the challenges learning organizations face in the transition from a traditionalist mindset to a forward-looking perspective on learning strategy. If learning organizations can't make this leap they are likely to be relegated to the back office."
-Michelle Marquard, director, corporate learning, Cisco Systems, Inc.

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Designing the Smart Organization

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

We live in turbulent times that are scary and exciting at the same time. It seems that the complex global system of interdependencies we've created over the past hundred years or so is suddenly cracking at the seams, creating massive concussions that reverberate throughout the world and challenge the very basis of our political and economic foundations. The leapfrog developments in technology and communications infrastructure open up tremendous opportunities to reshape how we deal with the world, but they are also threatening and potentially destructive if we lag behind in our ability to deal with complexity, assess the systemic impact of our actions, and govern global phenomena. We have to learn as individuals, organizations, and political systems to understand the emerging opportunity spaces and capitalize on them in ways that will lead us to a new quality of a global society in ecological balance with the planet. If we fail to do this, the consequences may be dire.

Corporations-especially large corporations-play a major role in this picture. With their global reach and powerful governance structures, they contribute significantly to the context they-and we all-live in, so they bear an increasing responsibility to act as global citizens. However, they are themselves under pressure to master these turbulences in a way that lets them thrive-or at least survive. They are faced with the imperative to develop new capabilities to more effectively deal with disruptive environments-or even better, to shape them. As in an evolutionary model in which the fittest organisms survive, corporations need to make their ability to learn a core part of their organization's DNA, so that they can be naturally smart, responsive, flexible, and responsible. If they succeed in doing so, they can keep up with, if not outrun, those changes that might otherwise remove them from existence.

Five Forces That Drive the Need for Learning

The driving forces behind the corporate learning imperative are numerous, and they reinforce each other. Let us explore the five most important drivers that pressure organizations to learn more deeply and in a different way and that force all of us to fundamentally rethink our notion of learning. They are:

* Massive disruption of the business context

* The rise of the knowledge-based organization

* A competence-based view of strategy

* The growing importance of the periphery of organizations

* The transformation from self-contained hierarchical organizations to "flat" and globally networked co-creation clusters

Massive Disruption

We are in the midst of disruptive change. The complex brew of rapidly advancing technologies, globalization, ecological megachallenges, and most recently the global breakdown of the financial markets leaves virtually no industry untouched. Take, for example, the automotive industry, which is slowly but with certainty reaching the end of limitless growth and needs to introduce radically new technologies. Or look at the media industry, which is wrestling with digital copyright issues and the substitution of old media with Internet-based models of production, distribution, and consumption. The pharmaceutical industry is being revolutionized through bioengineering and genetic technology, and the energy business needs to transform itself toward clean technologies of generation and consumption. And there is banking, which will not be the same once the dust of the financial crisis of 2008-2009 has settled.

In contrast to incremental change, which we can follow and understand as it emerges from familiar patterns of industry behavior and context evolution, discontinuous change surprises us. It comes out of nowhere, radically reconfiguring and rewriting the rules of the game. Because discontinuous change is so unfamiliar, the new rules are not yet clear; established response patterns are inappropriate; and it is hard to react to it adequately. In the wake of disruptive change, companies that cling to old business models may get destroyed, those who reinvent themselves survive, and new ones that embrace and invent new paradigms create new industry spaces.

Disruptive change that reinvents industries may be scary, but it is part of the game. As the Austrian economist Josef Schumpeter pointed out in his seminal work more than sixty years ago, "creative destruction" is the innovative power behind long-term economic growth and development, and as such it is at the heart of capitalism. The pace of industry change through radical innovation may have accelerated recently, but we have seen it before, for instance, with the explosion of groundbreaking inventions that happened within a few decades at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

But disruptive change today is different, because it is striking at more fundamental levels. We are seeing massive changes in the overall social, political, and economic contexts, all at the same time, and on a global scale. The past quarter of a century has been a period of breathtaking turbulence and disruption. The 1980s decade of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher launched emphatic industry deregulation in the Anglo-American business universe, unleashing the power of the free market with all its benefits and ugly excesses. In 1989, we witnessed the fall of the Soviet Empire, ending a period of relative political stability and predictability and adding a further dynamic to the global economy.

In the mid-1990s, the Internet took off, transforming our global communication infrastructure, reframing business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and lately also peer-to-peer relationships while generating countless new business models in its wake. We saw the burst of the Internet bubble in 2000, which solidified the new medium, transforming the adolescent dot.com craze into a mainstream business reality with a radical impact on all aspects of our lives, comparable to the invention of printing or the discovery of electricity.

Just one year later, in September 2001, we witnessed the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., which led to radical political changes in U.S. policy, resulting in two wars and rekindling religious fundamentalism as a global conflict conduit. The first decade of the millennium also saw the rapid rise of China and India as powerful players on the world stage, reshaping the global balance of trade, reconfiguring the production value chain of most corporations, and taking globalization to a new level.

And now, as we reach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, we witness a breakdown of the global financial infrastructure that is likely to end the period of ruthless Wall Street capitalism and reset not only the way we do business, but the way the global economy-and society-works. At the same time, we are finally starting to realize the seriousness of the ecological challenge that will transform in its own way the foundations of virtually all businesses and our way of life.

All this has happened at warp speed, more or less within one generation. Each and every one of these events has a tectonic quality about it; each hits against the others, and in their combined force, they put an almost...