Ever since the publication, nearly two decades ago, of Peter Senge’s monumental bestseller The Fifth Discipline, we’ve been in the age of the “learning organization.” Executives have come to understand that for their companies to stay ahead of the competition, their people, at every level, have to learn more (and more quickly) than the competition: new skills, new takes on emerging technologies, new ways to do old things, from manufacturing to marketing to R&D. Gary Hamel, the influential business strategist, likes to say that one of the most urgent questions facing leaders (and thus their companies) is, “Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?”
It’s hard to argue with this love of learning. But one thing I’ve learned over the last few years, as I’ve traveled the world in search of organizations unleashing big change in difficult circumstances, is that the most determined innovators — the organizations with the most original ideas about how to compete and win — aren’t just committed to learning. They are just as committed to teaching. They understand that the only sustainable form of market leadership is thought leadership. And if, as Aristotle famously said, “teaching is the highest form of understanding,” then they also understand that the most powerful way to demonstrate your position as a thought leader is to teach other organizations what you know — whether they are customers, suppliers, or even direct competitors.
Think of it as the rise of the teaching organization. One of the most compelling examples of this phenomenon is a health-care provider in Seattle called Virginia Mason, a 90-year-old hospital system with 400 doctors and nearly 5,000 employees. Dr. Gary Kaplan, the organization’s CEO, is something of a legend in healthcare circles for the turnaround he’s led since taking charge in February 2000. At the time, Virginia Mason was struggling with deteriorating finances, inefficient processes, and uneven quality. Kaplan and his colleagues became committed students of the Toyota Production System, the blend of management techniques that fueled the rise of the most powerful car company in the world. The CEO led frequent pilgrimages to Japan, adopted the strategies, practices, and management language of its Japanese mentor, and developed a whole new way of running a hospital that it calls the Virginia Mason Production System — a system that has delivered staggering improvements.
In other words, Virginia Mason became the ultimate learning organization. Now it aspires to become the ultimate teaching organization. A year ago, Kaplan created the Virginia Mason Institute and opened the doors of his hospital to the outside word. The Institute leads tours of the facilities and explains how they work, teaches classes in various management techniques, and otherwise shares what Virginia Mason knows with individual executives and entire healthcare systems. The student has become the teacher.
Why bother? “First and foremost,” Kaplan told me, “this is about our vision to be the quality leader in our field and to help transform the field as a whole. Part of our mission as a company is to help improve our industry. But the more we educate, the faster we move as well. This will spur us on, push us to keep getting better, and people will chase our taillights. Our credibility as a company is dependent on our ability to deliver results. By teaching others what we’ve learned, it forces us to keep learning.”
You don’t have to be a huge organization with a full-fledged institute to teach other companies what you know. The founders of 37signals, a fast-growing software company about which I’ve written in the past, have developed a truly original set of ideas about strategy, marketing, and the organization of work — ideas that have fueled their tremendous success. But they don’t keep those ideas to themselves. Through a series of conferences (called Seed), a fabulously instructive blog (called Signal vs. Noise), and even a free e-book on the Web (called “Getting Real“), Jason Fried and his colleagues share their ideas with anyone who wants to learn from them.
Their approach, they like to say, is not to out-market the competition, but to out-teach the competition. Why? Because teaching creates a different kind of presence in the marketplace. It creates a higher sense of loyalty among those who learn from you. And it helps the company create not just customers for its products but an audience for its ideas — in the same way that famous chefs are willing to share their recipes so as to build a following for their overall approach to cooking.
So by all means, stay focused as leaders on what your companies need to learn. But don’t miss the opportunity to share what you already know. The most idea-driven organizations have a chance to become the best teaching organizations — and we never forget our best teachers.
Source Harvard Business Review