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Toyota worries that automation means it has too many average workers and not enough craftsmen and masters. But if you increase Talent and decrease Labour, what else needs to change? Pretty well the entire management/leadership system and particularly 'human resource' management.

" Culture will overcome any structural chart or any reorganisation. Companies fail because they believe that a restructure will change the culture of the company.  Even if a restructure creates temporary success, culture will reassert itself. Often senior managers ignore organisational culture because it works for them, by ignoring culture; the senior managers indicate that the organisation cannot learn because they engage in single loop learning. "

It's not knowledge management" "Another point that stuck with me, as I had witnessed this, was Senge's observation that the field of knowledge management had been co-opted by information technology vendors, and had become useless for organizational learning. I was reminded of this while reading, Lost Knowledge: What are you and your organization doing about it? -"

"Taylorism-derived job analysis, evaluation and measurement are the tools (along with their underlying assumptions) that are used to create the skeletal architecture of hierarchical organizations, the pyramid we all know. - Jon Husband in Knowledge, power, and an historic shift in work and organizational design"

"As we learn to think for ourselves, we must also connect with others. We are only as smart as our knowledge networks. But we do not need someone to manage our connections. The simple guideline of self-direction, often enabled by network technologies, can create beautifully complex relationships amongst interconnected people. "

"The first one, It's the Company's Job to Help Employees Learn written by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Mara Swan (HBR 18 July) made a number of significant points. Here are a few soundbites: "most jobs today demand … the capacity to keep learning and developing new skills and expertise, even if they are not obviously linked to one's current job" "a major pillar in Google's recruitment strategy is to hire "learning animals"" "Sadly, most organizations have yet to wake up to this reality, so they continue to pay too much attention to academic qualifications and hard skills, as if what entry-level employees had learned during university actually equipped them for today's job market." "workplace learnability is far less structured and formulaic than college learnability, and employees must juggle the tension between the demand for the short-term efficiencies of productivity with the long-term quest for intellectual growth" "So how can managers do a better job of fostering learnability in the workplace? Select for it … Nurture it … Reward it""

"Abstract Everyone desires a secure life. Yet the security of more and more regions is undermined by unreliable and unequal availability of basics such as energy, water, food, natural resources, funds, co-operation, trust and hope for the future. Shocks such as the credit crunch, infectious diseases, climate instability and ecological collapses are converging towards a 'planet crunch' where security would become a fond memory. Traditional policy-making, that manages problems separately and incrementally, offers only the illusion of protection against impending unaffordable and irreversible shocks affecting all people. "

"The basic unit of social business technology is personal knowledge management, not collaborative workspaces." We are surrounded by information and have many ways to collaborate, but unless each person has effective sense-making processes, social business networks are mostly noise amplification.

Great Why statements and response that delve into innovation, network era and more. Also excellent links to resources "The network era workplace requires collaboration and cooperation because complex problems cannot be solved alone. Tacit knowledge, that which cannot be codified or put into a database, needs to flow. Social learning, developed through many conversations, enables this flow of tacit knowledge. This is not "nonsense chat", as traditional management might view it, but essential for creating stronger bonds in professional social networks. Companies have to foster richer and deeper connections which can only be built over time through meaningful conversations. This is why social learning in the workplace is necessary for business."

"As a global leader in the quick-service restaurant industry, Domino's Pizza has a concentration of jobs requiring a broad base of connections to people and information. The people in these jobs probably used traditional learning to help them attain key roles in supply chain, operations, marketing, or information services. However, an overlooked key to their success, and their future growth, is a type of learning in which they may not have even known they were engaged."

"On days like today, however, he participates in a program called "Googler to Googler," which places employees from across departments into teaching roles that would otherwise be filled by the HR department (or rather, as Google calls it, "People Operations"). Green's class is part of the Google core curriculum, which includes courses on management, orientation, and skills such as public speaking. Other classes taught Googler to Googler--everything from kickboxing to parenting--were initiated and designed by an employee."

Core messages re. hierarchical system and moving to network learning! "People need to take control of their learning in a world where they are simultaneously connected, mobile, and global; while conversely contractual, part-time, and local. Organizations must also move learning away from training and HR as some external quick-fix solution that gets called in from time to time. Learning must be an essential part of doing business in the network era. Learning has to be owned by the workers and learning support has to be a function of the business structure. If learning is the work today, why do we need a separate department responsible for managing it? And if workers really are responsible for their learning, why can't they take control of it?"

"The traditional guardians of our democracy, such as the Fourth Estate and our legislators, are in the thrall of the new platform monopolists. Interconnected and engaged citizens are our hope for a better future. We need to learn how to navigate the emerging network era. People have to take control of their learning: being connected, mobile, and global while conversely contractual, part-time, and local."