MIT Sloan Management Review

The CTO of Tata Consultancy Services describes how he learns from his organization’s collective intelligence.

New research offers insights into the factors that affect how much an organization learns from its innovation activities.

When seeking help from their network, top managers don”t leave it to chance. They think strategically about what type of advice to seek from what type of person.

For those learning to lead, experience trumps formal training. But some experiences matter more than others, as two unconventional but highly successful organizations — The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club — have recognized.

Nearly every organization has rightfully made innovation a priority, and management journals dedicate significant column inches to how to manage innovation.

Departing employees leave with more than what they know; they also take with them critical knowledge about who they know. That information needs to be a part of any knowledge-retention strategy.

Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently noted that in many cases, “old-fashioned corporate decision-making hasn’t caught up with new Information Age tools.” Indeed, companies must increasingly function as nodes in vast knowledge networks, and it is obvious that many of them are not up to the challenge.

The seeds of effective change must be planted by embedding procedural and behavioral changes in an organization long before the initiative is launched.

The key to making new employees productive quickly, known as “rapid on-boarding,” is to help them immediately build an informational network with co-workers.

Organizations are increasingly able to gather and process information from a variety of new sources. But competitive advantage will still belong to those who know how to use it.

Over the course of the past two decades, it has become increasingly, abundantly clear that companies must find ways to be more innovative, more flexible and better prepared.

Learning rarely follows a linear, upward progression. People forget what they once knew; institutional memory fades; obstacles of all kinds block individuals and groups from making progress. Sometimes an initially successful program or approach stops delivering results.

The authors contend that contemporary management education does a disservice by standardizing content, focusing on business functions (rather than on managing practices) and training specialists (rather than general managers). Working with several major international universities, the authors have developed seven tenets to improve MBA programs by grounding them in practical experience, shared insight and thoughtful reflection.

Theory-focused planning helps executives pursue ventures so cutting-edge that no road maps exist. The key is learning from strategic experiments.

Every decade or two, a big idea in management thinking takes hold and becomes widely accepted. The next big idea must enable businesses to improve the hit rate of strategic initiatives and attain the level of renewal necessary for successful execution. Scientific research on complex adaptive systems has identified principles that apply to living things, from amoebae to organizations. Four principles relevant to strategic work at Royal Dutch/Shell are outlined.

A powerful way to implement advanced software technologies is through incrementalism. Each self-contained implementation sequence achieves a specific business result. Using the strategy at a large manufacturer of office furniture systems, the authors implemented supply-chain-planning and-scheduling software at six sites — on time and within budget. The three critical success factors were technology divisibility, technology and methodology fit, and technology and organization fit.

How Allen Bradley Canada and its suppliers collaborated and learned from each other through shared resources and experiences.