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    Teaching Smart People How to Learn
    Teaching Smart People How to Learn
    Teaching Smart People How to Learn
    Ebook40 pages32 minutes

    Teaching Smart People How to Learn

    By Chris Argyris

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    About this ebook

    Why are your smartest and most successful employees often the worst learners? Likely, they haven't had the opportunities for introspection that failure affords. So when they do fail, instead of critically examining their own behavior, they cast blame outward—on anyone or anything they can. In Teaching Smart People How to Learn, Chris Argyris sheds light on the forces that prevent highly skilled employees for learning from mistakes and offers suggestions for helping talented employees develop more productive responses. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice-many of which still speak to and influence us today. The HBR Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each volume contains a groundbreaking idea that has shaped best practices and inspired countless managers around the world-and will change how you think about the business world today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarvard Business Review Press
    Release dateMay 19, 2008
    ISBN9781633691322
    Teaching Smart People How to Learn

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    • 5/5
      Good article which has opened my eyes as an Engineer who works from time to time with Consultants as Client Representative. I would recommend all professionals to take note and read the article.

    Book preview

    Teaching Smart People How to Learn - Chris Argyris

    LEARN

    Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the 1990s must first resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.

    Most companies not only have tremendous difficulty addressing this learning dilemma; they aren’t even aware that it exists. The reason: they misunderstand what learning is and how to bring it about. As a result, they tend to make two mistakes in their efforts to become a learning organization.

    First, most people define learning too narrowly as mere problem solving, so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Solving problems is important. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act. In particular, they must learn how the very way they go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own

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