Reflections on Learning
It goes without saying the course on organizational development and learning has made a profound impact on my understanding of business processes in the twenty first century environment. Nowadays there are a lot of complex perturbations in different spheres, including the market and the society on the whole, and each agent of the market must be not only strong and reliable, but to be competitive it should first of all be flexible and open to new strategies. The course has taught us how to respond to external pressures, how to link resources to customer needs and to improve quality of outputs with the help of such method as learning organization. Increasing the pace of change through the people oriented approach is the key notion of this method. In addition to that, the course provided a new understanding of knowledge management with three main perspectives (techno-centric, organizational and ecological).
Due to the course my relationships with the top managers have changed a little. In fact, I have been lucky enough to work with progressive and open-minded administrators, and I did already have much respect to all of them.
Still, I had a lot to share with them, even though people in my position were never listened to before. I have persuaded the managers my mind also counts, and the decision to organize the regular meetings with other office staff for sharing opinions was taken. We have also developed a new view on master-apprentice relationships and concluded an outline to work out new tools for “measuring and reporting intellectual capital” (as proposed by Wang and Ahmed). In short, there is a high chance for me to receive certain responsibilities of a knowledge manager, who is involved in “creation and maintenance of knowledge repositories to one that involves influencing the culture of an organization toward improved knowledge sharing, reuse, learning, collaboration and innovation,” according to Booker et al. (2008, 239). Organizational learning still has a lot of blank spots, nonetheless the deepest interest of strategy, economics and sociology scholars proves that this is a strong need of the time. At the same time commercial significance of learning organization has also attracted many consultants and companies. And we have seen the effect in practice.
All in all, the course has given us priceless knowledge ranging from information sciences to business management, making us acquainted with the concepts of organizational culture and development, learning processes, branding and marketing technologies and collaborative training.
References
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