This is a saying I first heard from Anthony DeMello: "When the mystic
points to the moon, the fool sees only his finger."
The gurus of the management world have a notion about what it takes for
organizations to succeed, however that is defined and measured; and then
we give labels to those notions. The less informed are apt to focus on
the label rather than the notion, but since labels are only
approximations, they can be re-interpreted.
The "Learning Organization" label can be interpreted as creating a
dichotomy - there are learning organizations(the healthy ones) and then
there are non-learning organizations(the sick ones). All managers want
their organizations to be healthy. If they presume that their
organizations are not but suffer from learning disabilities, they are apt
to embark on the LO journey to emulate someone's pre-conceived idea, and
it is easy to lose interest in that.
My interpretation of the LO label as a redundancy leads to another
approach, based on the view that learning and organization are not
adversaries. Rather than follow someone else's yellow brick road, a
manager needs to recognize that the search begins at home through an
awareness of existing capabilities. To push the analogy further, Dorothy
started in Kansas and her travels led to (back) there!
Regards,
Tony DiBella
AJDIBELLA@AOL.COM
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>