Beyond strategic planning to organization learning: Lifeblood of the individualized corporation

People are innately curious and, as social animals, are naturally motivated to interact and learn from one another. Over thousands of years, families, clans, and communities have evolved as teaching and learning groups, with individuals sharing information and synthesizing knowledge as a central part of their binding social interchange and as a key engine of their collective progress. Yet, somehow, modern corporations have been constructed in a way that constrains, impedes, and sometimes kills this natural human instinct. Focused on maximizing short‐term static efficiency, most have been designed to extract as much value as possible from all their assets, including people. In that process, however, they have sacrificed the long‐term dynamic efficiencies that come from continuously enhancing and upgrading the capabilities of individuals so as to enable them to create new value.