ABSTRACT
This chapter points out that having to depend on new blood – even new blood with supposedly superior experience – is an inefficient way to evolve and, specifically, learn. UK managers thought that they were paying too much for their employees' experience-rich labour, which was underperforming and providing employers – and the nation – with social, political and economic problems far in excess of any collective underpayments. Although most businesses see inequity as a justifiable market force, experiential learning teaches that business has to see the marketplace in a much less covetous timeframe. In the pursuit of decision-making excellence, experience has always been a fundamental imperative, the argument being that those who are practised are more effective decision-makers than those still in rehearsal. Learning from one's own organization's experiences is more effective than just benchmarking on its own, because using others' experience is never entirely relevant and has to be adapted to one's own environment anyway.
