continue until we build organizations that are more consistent with man's higher aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging."14
  Tom Peters talks about an "organization-as-university."15 And more and more companies are fitting that model.
   Quad/Graphics, the Wisconsin printing company with a $500 million-a-year turnover, has been specifically set up as a learning organization. All employees sign up as students. They work a four-day, 40-hour, flex-time week. On the fifth day they're encouraged to turn up in the company's classroom - without pay; and about half do. Everyone in the company is encouraged to be both a student and a teacher. You don't get promoted until you have trained your successor.16
   At Johnsonville Foods, another Wisconsin company, nearly every worker is taking a company-paid economics course at the local community college. Most work in small group projects. Each is encouraged to be a self-acting manager. Says one plant manager: "We're teachers. We help people grow. That's my main goal. Each person is his or her own manager."17
   In 1996 leading European managers for the third year running voted ABB, the Swiss-Swedish engineering group, as their most-admired company, and its president, Percy Barnevik, as Europe's most respected business leader.18 More than any other company, it has led western Europe's advance into the former communist-bloc countries. Barnevik says the group's aim is "the massive transfer of knowledge from east to west". After the fall of the Berlin Wall, ABB quickly invested in Poland and the Czech Republic. Now it is using Czech and Polish engineers to train staff at newly-acquired businesses in the Ukraine and Russia. And its companies in smaller countries, such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland have been entrusted with supporting emerging businesses in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The pattern is also being repeated in Asia.
   In Taipei, the China Productivity Center is playing a major part in Taiwan's drive to lift its income per person from $7,900 in 1990 to $20,000 in 2000.19 The CPC has pioneered new methods of bringing automation and total quality management techniques to Taiwan. Its main drive now is to add the world's best accelerated learning techniques to CPC's already big range of training skills. President Casper Shih is in no doubt about educational priorities: "The ideal purpose of education should be to instil the ability to learn. Teach how to learn, not what to learn, and the learning opportunities are endless." 20 He sees the

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Contents Page   Preface    Introduction