Organization as Brain - Essay Example

Organization as Brain The term “learning organization” has been in existence in the last two or three decades. However, the term gained massive popularity in 1990 when Peter Senge published the book The Fifth Discipline. The book became a bestseller and had the impact of popularizing the idea of organizational leaning among companies during that time and afterwards (Fiol & Lyles, 1985). A significant number of companies ended up hiring chief learning officers and human resources departments increased their budgetary allocation to training of employees.

This eventually resulted in the concept of organizational learning becoming a serious movement in the field of management (Senge & Wheatley, 2002). The concept is still being applied in companies at this moment as companies are making efforts to create competitive advantages by responding to the changing business environment (Senge, 2003). Apple Inc. is a fortune 500 company and has managed to apply the use of organizational learning in its processes. The company has been successful under the leadership of its former CEO Steve Jobs and still continues to maintain its performance under a new CEO.

However, the success of the company can be attributed to its innovative culture. The company has managed to produce some of the greatest products in history such as the IPod and IPad. Such an innovative culture results from the company’s learning processes. Group meetings are a regular part of the company with senior management holding meetings on a daily basis to focus on the progress of the company (Morgan, 2006). More time is allocated to group discussions and team education. This ensures that work teams are well informed and each of the members is able to improve their input to the project (Mapes, 2000).

The increasing emphasis on organizational learning has led to the sharing of the company’s vision among its employees. Every employee of the company irrespective of their position now works towards the achievement of the goals of the company because of a common vision. Each employee of Apple Inc. has a personal mental model of how the company, managers and team members operate. The mental models of individual employees are aligned with those of other employees resulting in an efficient learning process where employees are able to act coherently.

Managers are encouraged to set challenging but reasonable goals for their teams and also establish training programs to enhance learning skills among employees. Each employee at Apple Inc. has the initiative to make decisions. The learning processes have led to the company recording an increase in sales and introduce new innovative products (Jörg, 2010). The above analysis provides thoughtful insights of how an organization can learn to learn. This is through the introduction of training programs and including employees in decision making.

However, the success of organizational learning is determined by the level of efficiency of the learning processes (Beckford, 2002). The brain metaphor is an aspect of organizational learning because it has a number of strengths. It illustrates how learning should be a continuous process in the daily operations of an organization. This is because the brain has an unlimited capacity for knowledge. The metaphor provides insights on how an organization can improve its performance through learning.

However, the metaphor has the limitation of presenting learning as involving complex processes. This scares away organization which may have benefited from organizational learning (Akhtar & Khan, 2011). References Akhtar and Khan. (2011). "Exploring the Paradox of Organizational Learning and Learning Organization," from Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research In Business, 2 (9), pp. 257–270. Beckford. (2002). "Organizational Cybernetics," from Quality (Routledge), pp. 158–169. Fiol, M. C.

and Lyles, M. A. (1985). Organizational learning. The Academy of Management Review, 10(4), 803–813. Jörg. (2010). "Rethinking the Learning Organization," from Proceedings of the European Conference on Intellectual Capital, pp. 317–325. Morgan, G. (2006). Images of organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Mapes. (2000). "Holographic Teams," from Executive Excellence, 17 (3), p. 17. Senge and Wheatley. (2002). "Changing How We Work Together," from Reflections, 3 (3), 63– 67. Senge. (2003).

"Taking Personal Change Seriously: The impact of Organizational Learning on Management Practice," from Academy of Management Executive, 17 (2), 47–50.