Replying to LO27828 --
I wrote:
>Who are the most responsible people who DISAGREE with the organizational
>learning field? Who are the challengers to these ideas?
I had a short exchange with Peter Senge about this... Here's what we came
up with...
First, the five disciplines approach is hardly the norm for addressing
organizational improvement and change... So there must be a lot of people
who disagree!
Two particular groups with challenging or opposing notions:
1. Those who simply emphasize some other thing. There are many such
responsible voices. Gary Hamel, C.J. Prahalad, Michael Porter et al on
strategy; or Ed Schein and others on organizational culture and culture
change. There are many approaches to organizational change that don't pay
attention to the 5 disciplines.
2. Those in opposition to one or more of the basic tenets of
organizational learning:
a. Those who do not accept the notion that companies with a broader sense
of purpose will be superior companies over the long haul.
Peter writes, "I have maintained for a long time that 'the purpose of the
company is to maximize shareholder return' is a limiting concept -- even
from the standpoint of long term financial performance. This clearly runs
against the mainstream investor-business school-consulting firm
perspective. In particular, the 'shareholder' or 'invested capital' return
school argues that this is the real purpose of the corporation and other
ideas like developing a broader purpose are fundamentally wrong headed.
One debate that pulls out these differences is in the book (2000) by Beer
and Nohria, _Breaking the Code of Change_ which includes two papers
focused on this directly, one by Mike Jensen (one of the best known
advocates of the financial return perspective) and one by me."
b. Those who prefer a different approach to understanding systems. On one
side are the "soft systems" approaches (Peter Checkland... Flood has
already been mentioned here... Ackoff's approach to systems thinking in
planning). And, there's also a side who say that Senge's Systems Thinking
(with system archetypes) is counterproductive and that we really need
rigorous system dynamics. I believe Forrester himself would be in this
last group.
c. Those who don't really believe in learning, don't believe in investing
in people's capacity to learn.
Peter writes, "while most firms pay lip service to this, few actually take
it really seriously... They in effect oppose it by focusing on technical
changes and ignoring the cultural and inter-personal changes that are
often necessary, in my opinion, for successful implementation of otherwise
sound technical ideas."
Finally, In assoc w/Amazon.com, here's a link to the book Peter mentioned:
Breaking the Code of Change
by Michael Beer (Editor), Nitin Nohria (Editor)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1578513316/learningorg
--Richard Karash ("Rick") | <http://world.std.com/~rkarash> Speaker, Facilitator, Trainer | mailto:Richard@Karash.com "Towards learning organizations" | Host for Learning-Org Discussion (617)227-0106, fax (617)523-3839 | <http://www.learning-org.com>
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