ABSTRACT
The 1990s have been described as the “decade of learning corporations.” Fortune magazine has suggested “the most successful corporation of the 1990s will be something called ‘learning organization,’ a consummately adaptive enterprise.” A host of articles and books has addressed the issue. Senior executives including Ray Stata, CEO of Analog Devices, and Arie de Geus of Royal Dutch/Shell have proposed that organizational learning may be the source of the “only sustainable competitive advantage” (Stata, 1988). A new “special interest group” at the Academy of Management focuses academic research on this increasingly important and popular theme and related new academic journals are titled The Learning Organization and The Journal of Managerial Learning (Senge and Fulmer, 1993).
