Quoting your last reply,
"The rationale for any strategy for building a LO revolves around the
premise that such organizations will produce dramatically improved
results, compared to more traditional organizations." We looked at the
Stock market and a Best Companies rating for a quick analysis. Many
companies identified as LOs did not make the grade. But are such
measurements the way to go? Can you measure the changes wrought? If you
can't quantify as suggested in a recent article in the Systems Thinker,
are you excluding certain higher levels of thinking? I won't pretend to
have resolved such questions but I also am interested in the exploration
that gets beyond the surface comparisons and measures."
I'm still looking for a way to measure performance in a Learning
Organization. I think it's a very elusive issue, because, as you said,
quantitative metrics like the stock market may be misleading. Thinking in an
LO as a live organism, failing and learning from those errors, a short term
measure like the stock market performance in the last months may be
misleading. Going further, the time period needed to have a significant
metric should be at very least the time needed by the LO to learn and act
accordingly to the accumulated knowledge. As it would be unreasonable to
rank any organization for the last day's stock value, it makes no sense to
rate a LO for a too short period of time.
--"Luis J. Colorado" <luiscolorado@sprintmail.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>