The
Business Value
of Learning
Two leading researchers say when companies develop a
market orientation and a learning orientation, they
increase employee and customer engagement.
Customer
and employee engagement are straightforward concepts.
Fully engaged customers, for example, are so psychologically
connected to the companies they do business with, they'll
often go out of their way to get to their favorite outlet,
bypassing its competitors along the way. Engaged employees
are highly productive and committed because they feel
a deep emotional attachment to their work. What's more,
engaged customers and employees help companies deliver
better financial performance.
But companies can realize greater -- and more rapid --
gains in performance when these two powerful concepts
are brought together onto a single platform called HumanSigma.
HumanSigma is a management approach and metric that examines
the combined impact of employee and customer engagement
at a local level within an organization. An optimized
workgroup, one in which workers and customers are deeply
engaged with the company, not only has a high HumanSigma
score, but it also returns significant business benefits
to the organization -- benefits that are exponentially
better than focusing on either employee or customer engagement
alone.
Improving HumanSigma performance, however, requires disciplined
hard work and isn't always easy. It may require a company
to reorganize to better align itself with HumanSigma management
principles. Or it may require the company to transform
itself by finding new ways to do things while learning
to do the things it already does better. Or it may require
the organization to rethink some of its core assumptions.
Two professors, William Baker, Ph.D., of San Diego State
University, and James Sinkula, Ph.D., of the University
of Vermont, suspect that they know what at least a few
of those assumptions may be. "A company could have
a false sense of security that it's doing what it's supposed
to do: looking at customers, looking at competitors, looking
at employees, doing research, and basing strategy on research
findings," says Baker. "But if they're not learning
correctly, they could be basing what they do on a set
of false assumptions."
And
false assumptions can throw a business seriously off course.
A perfect, and perfectly ironic, example of this is Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc. The company has been publishing its celebrated
encyclopedia since 1768, and it has continued to build
on its success in the succeeding centuries. But Encyclopædia
Britannica stumbled in the 1980s, as emerging technologies
increasingly drove knowledge sources online. Customers
saw no need to buy 32 heavy books when they had access
to information on the Internet. Encyclopædia Britannica
could have gone under.
"They stayed an encyclopedia company too long,"
says Baker. "[As] an encyclopedia company, they could
do everything right: monitor their customers and the competition,
make improvements to encyclopedias. But they still missed
the bigger picture."
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Learning.
Reprinted
from Gallup Management Journal |
Note
from Kevin
 Greetings!
Many
of you have seen the LeadersWay Program, The Separation
Zone. The context speaks to the controlling factors
that serve to separate one business from another in ways
that are difficult, if not at times impossible, to replicate.
I
would expect and certainly hope that every one of you
reading this newsletter would want to focus large amounts
of your time, energy and resources to achieving this business
distinction. The idea of not feeling you have to look
over your shoulder to see where your competitors are or
what they are doing is one of the most significant benefits
to making a commitment to working in The Separation
Zone.
In this month’s newsletter, "The Business Value
of Learning," you will read about the most important
"separator" of all: LEARNING! If not now, you
will soon realize that the most significant advantage
you have in business is an organizational commitment to
learning. Here’s how it works. In context to utilizing
all of our resources on those things you can control,
it’s important to embrace the idea that you cannot
control what’s happening in today’s business
environment. And, unless you’ve been in a cave for
the last bunch of years you know that our business environment
is changing at a frenetic if not manic pace.
Separating
yourself from your competitors begins with recognizing
it’s within your ability to respond to these changes
in an effective, productive and positive way. Learning
IS the controlling factor that allows you, your people
and your organizations to recognize and leverage all the
opportunities that most of your competitors are destined
to miss.
You’ve
heard me pound and pound the importance of learning. Now,
how about hearing it from the people at Gallup!
Life
is good...
KW
|
