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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
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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