Patrice Fauvet said, "Having read many of the articles published about
Learning Organisations, as well as the general comments people have made
on this site; I would be interested in seeing a business case for a
Learning Organisation. I know it may be maddeningly elusive to quantify
the benefits that a company may derive from trying to become a learning
organisation; but surely someone, somewhere may be able to convince the
sceptical accountant that a business case exists, that the benefits to be
obtained far outweigh the costs and that making a better use of our
resources is the only way forward."
It's an excellent question. Here are some of the questions that have to
be answered in order to come to grips with it. What is a LO? What will
it do for my company's performance? How will it benefit my customers?
Under what circumstances does LO work, and when does it appear not to
work? In what form will the payback occur? Where will I see the
improvements? How will my P&L change? What is the impact on my asset
base and my liabilities? What is the process for creating it, and how
much does that cost? What investments are required, what is the ROI, and
what is the risk of failure? what alternative investments do we know
about that have equal ROI with less risk of failure?
To get a handle on some of these questions, we might do an assessment of a
similar 'technology' such as TQM. It would be interesting to get the ROI
(and subsequent failure rate) for companies that claim to have implemented
TQM, for companies that have proven they have implemented TQM, and for
companies that have won the Baldridge award. We could also assess the
process by which it was implemented. Someone from an insurance company
proposed a standardized implementation process, and we can assess how
applicable that might be in other areas, or even as a general process. I
would be curious about perceptions on this issue.
For some organizations (eg the Marines) the questions will be inherently
different because the goals are so different. However, the skeptical
accountant question is still valid, because there are probably a few ways
-- with different cost structures -- for the Marines to prepare to achieve
their goals.
For me personally, now that I have posed the questions, LO appears more
than ever in the experimental stages. We may wish -- I believe we should
-- press forward with experiments to flesh out some of these questions,
but we don't have the information right now to convince the skeptical
accountant.
-- Rol Fessenden LL Bean, Inc 76234.3636@compuserve.com