Leading-edge learning

Fifth Discipline author Peter Senge and General Electric chairman and CEO Jack Welch share their thoughts on what it means to learn and lead as we race towards the millennium. Both men were honored last year by the American Society for Training & Development. Senge was awarded the 1998 Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance Award, and Welch received the Champion of Workplace Learning and Productivity Award. Senge, who introduced the business world to the term learning organization, starts off by saying that no one knows what that is. He explains that because an organization is a "living human community" and always evolving, anyone's definition of it is a "limited approximation." He advises business corporations and leaders to pay great attention to their outside environments-not just inputs and outputs. Senge says that the role of training professionals in future learning organizations will be on two levels: a consultative role of expertise and experience in learning processes and a role as "internal networker," taking new ideas and moving them around. Welch describes CTE's "boundaryIess learning culture," in which people of all ranks and functions come together to focus on a problem or opportunity and then act rapidly and decisively on the best ideas, regardless of their source. He talks about the "wellspring of ideas and learning, with ten of thousands of people playing alternate roles of teacher and student." Welch says that the best leaders have enormous energy, the ability to energize others, and a vision they can impart vividly and powerfully.