ABSTRACT
How do you do it? What does it look like? How do you ensure that it delivers to its full potential while continuing to meet the changing needs of business? This chapter reports on one way of answering such questions, based on five years' sustained pursuit of organizational learning in BAE SYSTEMS, a large multinational defence systems and aerospace company. It outlines the approaches and practices that have been used to stimulate, enable, nurture and deliver organizational learning at individual, team and business levels. This work has been the continuing central focus of BAE SYSTEMS' corporate university, known as the Virtual University (VU). The authors start by describing the VU, by locating it within the BAE SYSTEMS corporate landscape, and by explaining the model of organizational learning that has informed their approach. The VU activities thus aimed for a 'close coupling' between the business/operational challenges, and the identification of core organizational capabilities and competencies required to support these challenges.
