Life-long Learning: How to Cook Up Continuous Improvement

Posted by Doug Foster in Entrepreneurship (November 21, 2005 at 12:10 pm)

Last night I happened to be cooking in a large commercial kitchen helping my wife get a large order ready for her company Indigo Rabbit. I noticed that at the top of the large white board in the kitchen they had written “What have you done today to make yourself a better chef?” They then recommended that if you spend one hour a day reading or learning a new technique, it might only improve your cooking by 1/2% per week, but that improvement in a two year period will lead to a more than 100% improvement in your overall performance. It ended by challenging everyone to set specific goals for their improvements and to track their success.

This reminded me how life-long learning and continuous improvement need to be an important part of both our personal goals and our corporate culture.

For the learning at a corporate level to be effective, it needs to be integrated into the corporate culture and become part of the normal workflow. If an employee sees reviewing their training requirements or taking specific training as an event that “takes them away from their jobs” then they will continue to fight it and not take it seriously. If, on the other hand, they see it as just being part of their job, no different then how they would use other corporate tools and resources such as e-mail, team calendaring, etc. then the process and the learning become natural.

As part of this process, consider including the ability to set personal goals and track additional learning activities within the corporate learning management system. By doing this, the company is showing employees how they value life-long learning and that it is part of the corporate culture.

My specific goals in learning are to continue to post weekly on this blog. I am a firm believer that someone does not fully understand a concept until they can teach others. So stay tuned as I continue to learn and teach, and feel free to comment or question me if I am not clear on any specific topics. That is the only way I will know if this is working.

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