Planning as Learning Harvard Business Review.pdf下载
Some years ago, the planning group at Shell surveyed 30 companies that had heen in husiness for
more than 75 years. What impressed us most was
their ahihty to live in harmony with the husiness environment, to switch from a survival mode when
times were turhulent to a self-development mode
when the pace of change was slow. And this pattern
rang a familiar hell hecause Shell's history is similarly replete with switches from expansion to selfpreservation and hack again to growth.
Early in our history for example, there was a hurst
of prosperity in the Far East and we dominated the
market for kerosene in tins and "oil for the lamps of
China." Survival hecame the keynote, however,
when Rockefeller's Standard Oil snatched market
share hy cutting price. In fact, it was the survival instinct that led in 1907 to the joining of Royal Dutch
Petroleum and the Shell Transport and Trading
Company-separate husinesses until then and competitors in the Far East. This, in turn, paved the way
for Shell's expansion into the United States in 1911
with a new product, Sumatran gasoline-also a reaction to Standard Oil's activities.
Outcomes like these don't happen automatically
On the contrary, they depend on the ahihty of a company's senior managers to ahsorb what is going on in
the business environment and to act on that information with appropriate husiness moves. In other
words, they depend on leaming. Or, more precisely,
on institutional learning, which is the process
wherehy management teams change their shared
mental models of their company, their markets, and
their competitors. For this reason, we think of planning as leaming and of corporate plarming as institutional learning.
Institutional leaming is much more difficult than
individual learning. The high level of thinking
among individual managers in most companies is admirable. And yet, the level of thinking that goes on in
the management teams of most companies is considerably below the individual managers' capacities. In
institutional leaming situations, the leaming level of。。。。
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