Strategic Targets, Strategic Thrusts, and Innovative Learning - Research Paper Example

The actions taken by the partners before, during, and after the learning process directly affects the likelihood that learning will occur properly. Although organizations spend a lot of time and money on employees’ learning annually, there exists no significant relationship between learning and actual job performance. However, when the learned skills are successfully transferred into effective job performance, learning can surely produce far better outcomes.

Due to volatile market preferences and needs, learning organizations have to focus more on strengthening their internal resources and capabilities. As Grant (2005) has stated, “When the external environment is in a state of flux, the firm itself, in terms of its bundle of resources and capabilities, maybe a much more stable basis on which to define its identity”, the rate at which learning takes place within organizations thus contributes towards achieving sustainable competitive advantage. Organizations must have their own unique ways to encourage and value employed workforce in order to motivate their commitment towards innovative pursuits.

An organization requires its employees' competence in achieving present as well as future performance goals. Human resource management is instrumental in determining the strategic position of an organization in competitive learning environments. Organizations unique set of available resources and capabilities enables it to build a learning strategy focused on an internal environmental variable rather than just following the market trends. A highly qualified and unique workforce is one of the prime resources of organizations. Organizations often tend to systematically evaluate potential employees in terms of setting up future performance targets at the time of hiring. An organization that values its employees with benefits and performance rewards for enhancement of the learning process enjoys a firm competitive advantage. Successful integration of learning and workforce concerns is the strategic ability distinguishing organizations from each other.   

Effective implementation of strategy requires both the prevailing conditions of scarcity and the relevance of a resource. While implementing a learning strategy, an organization should analyze its human resources closely as if learning variables are durable, transferable, and replicable or not. It is important to note that organizations usually suffer in absence of optimized human resource development as employees may become adaptive to certain work attitudes and habits affecting overall performance adversely. Learning organizations therefore often strive hard to achieve valuable, rare, inimitable, and organized resources for establishing a sustainable competitive strategy. However, organizations differ in their structure and human resource development. The centralization management approach is a major barrier in most learning environments. Organizations need to learn from their failures and develop strategies according to their internal and external dynamic environments.

In conclusion, most organizations are successful only because of being able to maintain a fair balance between strategic targets, strategic thrusts, innovative learning, and human resource development. Identification and analysis of failures are critical in learning for experimentation of innovations. Along with the learning process, utilizing human resource development as part of accomplishing a competitive advantage is not only profitable but also helps in achieving a high-level approach to innovativeness and creativity in the long run.