I’ve just done a Google.com search to update my long-held recognition of one of our biggest areas of unrelenting business weakness. Typing in the words “no stone unturned”, which is a reassuring way of someone claiming energetic action for something gone wrong, I received a breath-taking number of hits – more than 3 million. Anecdotal evidence for widespread corporate dysfunction, yes, but just to cross check, I then typed in the words “poor decision making”. Up came the equally eye-watering figure of 2.56 million. Similar staggering numbers came up for “bad decisions” - 5.3 million hits – while the more clearly identifiable sub-set category of “repeated mistakes” threw up 81,000 hits and “must learn the lessons” (another way of saying “no stone unturned”) signalled 237,000 hits.
The numbers for these watchwords without the quotation marks, which provides a less weighty indicator of corporate deficiency but nevertheless is still closely correlated, is also very sobering. No stone unturned = 3.5 million hits, poor decision making = almost 76 million hits, bad decisions = 106 million hits, repeated mistakes = over 18 million hits and must learn the lessons = over 88 million hits. All these, of course, are just the visible signs of much of our business-related dysfunction, which raises the question how many more unpublicised bungles – and therefore unseen by Google – are there?
The long list of the latest acknowledged defaulters covered references to Europe’s bankers who, according to London’s Financial Times, have forgotten the lessons of the Depression and a Canadian medical doctor whose observation that the vitamin C lessons that prevented scurvy could help overcome same vitamin-deficient disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, heart attack, cancer, pneumonia, and even stretch marks in birthing mothers. Printed out, they would consume quite a few forests – but they also carry an important message for employers and business educators.
It is that commerce and industry are not very good at learning from their – and others’ - hard-won and expensively-acquired experience. And much of it for one surprisingly explanation that seems to have bypassed almost everybody? It is the modern workplace practice of short jobs tenure that allows an employers’ special knowledge to keep walking out of the front door, never to be used by its paymaster patron. Corporate amnesia is rampant, as is experiential NON-learning.
See http://biggernumbers.wordpress.com/ for my White Paper assessment of the size of the problem - and the solution.
