ABSTRACT
About 20 years ago I woke up one morning and found myself dead. This was particularly frustrating as it turned out that brain death had occurred some 10 years earlier and nobody had had the good manners to tell me. Fortunately a cure was at hand, my brain was catapulted back into life not by some Star Trek-style cortical stimulator device but by the simple, yet elegant, act of learning. In my case the process involved taking a year’s sabbatical at the age of 40 and returning to university to do a full-time Master’s programme. I am pleased to report that I am now very much alive and learn something new every single day. At the end of a day or week I reflect on the period that has just passed and I ask myself – not ‘what have I learned’ but rather ‘what new ways have I found to learn’. Learning is the difference between being a member of the waking dead and doing something worthwhile. In our organisations it is the difference between success and falling well short of achieving our collective goals.
