How Organizations Learn or The Mighty Experiment

How Organizations Learn: An Integrated Strategy for Building Learning Capability

Author: Dibella Anthony

Empower Your Business to Succeed by Learning

?How Organizations Learn gets to the practicalities and realities of organizational learning. This is not a fad; it's the outline of effectiveness for organzations of the future.?

?Parick Canavan, corporate vice president and director of global leadership & organization development, Motorola

In this essential volume, authors DiBella and Nevis outline exactly what it means to be a learning organization. And they offer sound advice on how to increase the learning capabilties of your own company. Here you will discover a powerful array of tools and techniques for leveraging your organization's unique learning style, as well as a productive framework that will help your company learn more fully and adapt more quickly in today's volatile marketplace. A practical fusion of theory, original research, and real-world methodology, How Organizations Learn is the most comprehensive work to date concerning this all-important competitive advantage.

Table of Contents:

	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	The Authors
Pt. I	A Strategic Look at Organizational Learning
1	Developing Learning in Organizations: A Matter of Perspective	3
2	Foundations of an Integrated Strategy	19
3	How Organizations Learn: Learning Orientations	39
4	Why Organizations Learn: Facilitating Factors	61
Pt. II	Helping Organizations Learn
5	Recognizing Your Organization's Learning Portfolio	83
6	Developing a Learning Strategy	99
7	Improving Organizational Learning Capability	119
8	Enhancing Effectiveness at Each Phase of the Learning Cycle	135
9	Assessing Learning Capability Over Time	165
Pt. III	Adapting and Assessing the Learning Strategy
10	Using an Integrated Strategy in Different Contexts	179
11	Conclusion: What Is the Good of All This Learning? Assessing the Impact of Learning on Performance	195
	References	205
	Index	211

Book about: Beyond a Boundary or Lone Wolf

The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation

Author: Seymour Drescher

By the mid-eighteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade was considered to be a necessary and stabilizing factor in the capitalist economies of Europe and the expanding Americas. Britain was the most influential power in this system which seemed to have the potential for unbounded growth.
In 1833, the British empire became the first to liberate its slaves and then to become a driving force toward global emancipation. There has been endless debate over the reasons behind this decision. This has been portrayed on the one hand as a rational disinvestment in a foundering overseas system, and on the other as the most expensive per capita expenditure for colonial reform in modern history.

In this work, Seymour Drescher argues that the plan to end British slavery, rather than being a timely escape from a failing system, was, on the contrary, the crucial element in the greatest humanitarian achievement of all time. The Mighty Experiment explores how politicians, colonial bureaucrats, pamphleteers, and scholars taking anti-slavery positions validated their claims through rational scientific arguments going beyond moral and polemical rhetoric, and how the infiltration of the social sciences into this political debate was designed to minimize agitation on both sides and provide common ground. Those at the inception of the social sciences, such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, helped to develop these tools to create an argument that touched on issues of demography, racism, and political economy. By the time British emancipation became legislation, it was being treated as a massive social experiment, whose designs, many thought, had the potential to change the world.

Thisstudy outlines the relationship of economic growth to moral issues in regard to slavery, and will appeal to scholars of British history, nineteenth century imperial history, the history of slavery, and those interested in the history of human rights.

"Drescher should be commended for providing us with a study that future historians will mone for precious detail on the relationship between abolitionism and nineteenth-century social sciences, and one that affords us valuable insight into the mentality of British abolitionists."-- The Journal of Modern History Mighty Experiment can be seen as the culmination of decades of painstaking research and mature reflection on the complicated process that in the British empire forwarded the global project of human emancipation."--The Journal of Social History