The Smarter Organization

In The Smarter Organization, based on years of hands-on work with some of the world's most successful corporations, McGill and Slocum will show you how to make the idea of the learning organization become a practical reality in your company. Drawing upon real-life examples from over 175 companies, this book reveals what makes for a learning organization and how you can make your company smarter. You will learn how to create a learning culture, how to craft a learning strategy, how to design structures and systems that promote learning, how to motivate a work force through learning, and how to lead a learning organization.

Filling a gap in the literature, this book offers an innovative interdisciplinary approach to learning for corporate strategic development, linking the domains of strategy, organizational design, and learning. To demonstrate how this process drives the boundaries of the practice way beyond the established notion of simple training and management education, the book is filled with detailed case studies from leading global organizations, including Siemens, ABB, BASF, the US Army, PricewaterhouseCoopers, EADS, Novartis, and more. These studies reveal how large-scale corporations are using the power of dynamic corporate learning approaches to drive innovation, enhance cultural values, master post-merger integration, transform business models, enhance leadership culture, build technological expertise, foster strategic change processes, and ultimately increase bottom line results. For any company that wants to compete in the 21st century, Designing the Smart Organization offers inspiring perspectives for integrating corporate learning as a core business practice that will create sustainable strategic and organizational capabilities.

When everyone in an organization is focused on results it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. This book uses the experience of Nokia to develop a frame-work for the organization of the future - one which is efficient, learning and healthy.

Why do some firms deliver a stream of successful products and services while others continually make poor R&D decisions? According to the Mathesons, successful firms have internalized the nine interlocking principles of smart organizations -- the building blocks of a corporate culture that emphasize making the right strategic decisions at the right times while aligning organizational practices to support these decisions and sustain their results. Among the nine principles are embracing uncertainty; open information flow; system thinking; and developing a value creation culture. Once in place, these values enable companies to make appropriate choices about their R&D planning, portfolio management, and project and business strategies. The authors stress the importance of evaluating trade-offs, creating alternatives, balancing risk and return, and getting buy-in across functional areas to ensure that decisions will be viable from both technical and management perspectives. "If more companies were to act like this, there might be less demand for off-the-peg strategies from consultants." -- The Economist, July 11, 1998.

The first in the readers' series called Resources for the Knowledge-Based Economy, Knowledge Management and Organizational Design is a unique compilation of articles and book excerpts that describe how the management of an organization shapes the levels of knowledge transfer, innovation and learning. The collection draws on fifty years of management thinking and presents key issues facing knowledge-intensive organizations. The selections are concise, clearly written and present a rich framework of examples drawn from real management experience. Arranged thematically, the chapters discuss decision-making, organization structure, innovation, strategic alliances, managing knowledge workers and power relations. Represented in this volume are the ideas of influential academics including the late economist Frederick Hayek and French sociologist Michael Crozier, as well as world-renowned management thinkers such as Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Charles Handy.

Contributing to recent debate on the emergence of digital and agile work, this book explores the implications for labour and employment relations within and beyond organizational boundaries. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to the key issues and challenges of digitalization, this collection covers topics such as the gig economy, crowdworking and Industry 4.0. Theory and analysis are combined as the authors examine the impact of digital and smart work on organization, HRM and labour law. With comprehensive empirical evidence for those interested in understanding the more complex trajectories of today’s transforming work relationships, this book will not only appeal to students and academics but also to policy-makers, trade unionists and employers’ organizations.

Information is the organisation's strategic resource, yet much of the information that an organisation recieves, is nuance and innuendo; more of a potential that a prescription for action. This book will help you gain an understanding of how an organisation may manage its information processes more effectively in order to increase its capacity to learn and adapt.