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HUMAN LEARNING -
NATURAL DRIFT TO LOOSE COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
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- DEBRIEF - Is Caterpillar ever going to ditch KM practices ? I don't think so. 3,000 CoPs cannot be wrong. Quality products and services ultimately come from quality operational staff that management has cultivated over time through solid KM practices. That is the Caterpillar formula. There
is no turning back for Caterpillar. Caterpillar implicitly acknowledges that all hired staff are intelligent and that management must listen to their ideas and select the best ones. Ideas were not and will never be the exclusive domain of senior managers unlike in most contemporary organisations surveys continue to show. I would have liked Powers to have searched out recent acquisitions by Caterpillar to see how the new staff transitioned to the Caterpillar learning organisation mindset. Virtual CoPs were strongly used here. These were initiated by staff themselves with a good business case to do so. These CoPs were User Initiated. That greatly increases the sustainability of these learning groups. Management has tried in the past to form these groups but have produced poor outcomes. These groups must be encouraged by management but should be formed by the end-users. But they don't have to be on-line. Another global manufacturer used only face-to-face CoPs and obtained very similar outstanding results for its industry. 3,000 CoPs in five years..and growing ! Outstanding... with outstanding results for the company. Imagine the value put on that Knowledge Network if it all the files got irretrievably lost by a malicious virus ! How are we protecting our intellectual capital ? What Ford Motor Company was to the industrial era in the early 20th Century, Caterpillar (and Nucor) may well be for the knowledge era of the 21st Century. Large industrial manufacturers of today may have no excuse not to establish KM practices now.
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