Transforming Performance through a Learning Organization Strategy

Citation

Peters, J. (1999), "Transforming Performance through a Learning Organization Strategy", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 44-45. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwl.1999.11.1.44.1

I published a paper some time ago by an Australian academic. It was, eventually, entitled “Management duckspeak”, following the term coined by George Orwell in 1984 to represent the sounds of jargon trotted out with no regard to meaning, like the quacking of a duck.

The last lines of “Management duckspeak” dealt with some in‐vogue terms and their “real” meaning. I remember the last one of all, which was “The learning organization = claptrap”.

Unkind, maybe, but not really. Quite a lot of the time when I hear people talk about the learning organization I feel a strong desire to “reframe their mental models”, preferably with a large stick.

But guess what? Here is a book which actually mostly uses plain English. It’s quite short (just over 100 pages) and it has quite big print. It probably won’t satisfy the pretentious amongst the learning organization cognoscenti, but it probably will satisfy managers who are trying to get their heads around organizational learning.

Sandelands and Christie have a real talent for communication and they should be proud of themselves to have written something people can really understand, rather than just pretend they do. Duckspeak? No thanks!