Chapter 15 - Just do it!

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Just do it!	505

translation of The Learning Revolution and Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline as models. Telenor sent two senior executive officers, Hans Haakonsan and Earnst Risan, to one of co-author Vos's ten-day workshops in San Diego for training. It also bought a copy of The Learning Revolution for every staff member involved in a pre-test of its total program. And a year later it sent more trainers to Vos workshops.
  Haakonsan says Telenor is now "focusing on values, instead of rules".9 The base values are "responsibility, respect, creativity and integrity". And the key values are "customer satisfaction, good bottom line, good teamwork and focus on long-term development".
  One of the big challenges, he says, is in building appropriate mental models. An example? "How to make the impossible possible - and we're doing it."
  Accelerated-learning methods are being adopted, too, in more and more American businesses. The Center for Accelerated Learning in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, for instance, reports results like these:
      Judy Authier of Cooperators Insurance says: "Our investment in accelerated learning has paid us back ten-fold." 10
      Kimberly-Clark's Randy Atkins says: "Accelerated learning is the best training investment our organization has ever made." 11
      On one course at Intel, participants on an AL course achieved a 507 percent knowledge gain, compared with 23 percent by "normal" training methods.12
      Of Travelers Insurance representatives studying a computer system, 67 percent learning by AL methods end up in the highest quartile of grades, compared to only 14 percent by traditional methods.13

The "cluster" model
 
  One of the best model of all, for any small country or state to profit most from the learning revolution, is the "cluster" model.
  This is the concept promoted extensively by the Harvard Business School and especially Professor Michael Porter who argues that industries develop best around "clusters of excellence".14
  The outstanding example of this is California's Silicon Valley. It has radiated out from the brilliant leadership of Stanford University and especially Professor Fred Terman, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, Bob Noyce and the other engineers who originally formed Fairchild

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