Understanding Organizations as Learning Systems

Abstract

How can you tell if your company is, indeed, a organization? What is a organization anyway? And how can you improve the systems in your company? The authors provide a framework for examining a company, based on its learning orientations, a set of critical dimensions to organizational learning, and facilitating factors, the processes that affect how easy or hard it is for to occur. They illustrate their model with examples from four firms they studied ? Motorola, Mutual Investment Corporation, Electricit« de France, and Fiat ? and conclude that all organizations have systems that support learning.