Workplace Learning Principles

The Learning Organization represents the new cure-all panacea in Corporate America. More evolved than past favorite catchphrases and concepts like empowerment, and Total Quality Management (TQM), the learning organization represents a new paradigm in corporate management and employee relations. The emphasis on leadership has changed: the emphasis is now on learned workers, community and the absence of the conventional lone hero model of management. Peter Senge, an academic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helped evolve the paradigm in his book The Fifth Discipline, which gives primary importance to systems thinking, believes “the failure of past models—particularly, the collision of directive leadership with the development of ‘knowledge workers’ who may know more about relevant matters than their bosses—creates a need for ‘a community of leaders’ rather than the single ‘hero-leader’ idea that has long been so popular in Anglo-American business” (Trapp 4).

This analysis will examine the main concepts and ideas proposed in Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, before exploring how many of these concepts are incorporated into the organizational learning strategy introduced by Ford Motor Co

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out using tools like these, Senge believes the organization will die from learning deficits and he argues that most do before they turn forty years old. However, as his quote from Archimedes is meant to demonstrate how far the organization might go if it employs the practices he advocates “with a lever long enough…single-handed I can move the world” (Senge Inside Jacket Cover). For the manager, we can see that the focus needs to be on learning, change, and experiment. Without this flexibility, learning disabilities that may cripple the goals of the manager and/or the organization will result. FORD MOTOR CORPORATION Ford Motor Corporation recently introduced a strategy for organizational learning that embodies many of the concepts proposed by Peter Senge in his five principles of the learning organization. One of the biggest ways in which they did this was to institute the five principles proposed by Senge without the hard sell. They were more inclined to get people to adopt them through a more personal approach, which is well-suited to success in implementing them because it goes a step beyond mere empowerment and treats the employee as a valuable asset with ideas and beliefs of their own “The Fifth Discipline took empowerm
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Approximate Word count = 2246
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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