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Plenary Speeches
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Theme 1 |
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Theme 4
My contribution to this morning's discussions is based upon a business perspective. We are going to live in a society with lifelong learning and the workplace must be our most important university. We are in a war in the global business community, and we are not going to win this war and survive if we are away from work, if we are sitting in classrooms, carrying out theoretical studies. In order to achieve learning at work, we must carry out a revolution in work life. That revolution is going on already in the leading European companies. We are all caught in the globalisation process, where the flow of information, ideas, money and people proceeds so much more easily than ever before. This means that the life cycles - of products, of technologies, of business ideas - the life cycles are becoming shorter and shorter. That also means that the lifetime for applied knowledge, knowledge which is tied in our businesses, the lifetime of that knowledge is also becoming shorter and shorter, and we have to create a continuous renewal of competence on all levels. I use the word 'competence' throughout the whole talk here, and I mean competence. If you add skills and knowledge together, you achieve competence. We have in my country, as well as in many European countries, rather much of what I call 'over-mature businesses'. These are businesses which were established a long time ago and which are going not only mature but over-mature; and we are losing large areas of such businesses to younger nations which can provide better conditions for these businesses. In layman's terms, we can say these are businesses with relatively low demands on competence. We have lost in my country, for example, textiles, ready-made clothing, 3D art and many other areas. The businesses that are going well and that can succeed are those which are more based on advanced knowledge and are about advanced competence. New Industrial Revolution One of our fastest growing businesses areas is mobile telephones, which did -not exist in 1980, and with this development it becomes even more necessary to have a rapid renewal of competence. We are thrown into a new industrial revolution which started maybe in the late '70s or early '80s, but we are now in the middle of it. I have visited several companies in Europe who are in this fight, in this global war, who are in the forefront. Everywhere they are witnessing that it is about achieving a rapid renewal of competence or to die. In this fight, it is very easy to see that there is an emerging new dialogue coming up, where management and employees and their representatives are working closely together, fighting the enemy together. I think this is a very promising feature of what is happening now. There is a joint interest between these people to stay in the market, to be competitive enough; for the employees it also means that they have greater chances to stay employable throughout their lives. So this is a feature of the new worksite dialogue, and as I see it, it is a new paradigm. Away from what we can call scientific management, we see an emerging new world of work coming up. Renewal As I see it, there are three important dimensions in this renewal process. Firstly and mainly, a radical renewal of the way that companies are organised, creating learning organisations. Secondly, a strong emphasis on competence development for everybody, all the time. Thirdly, a new leadership, a supportive leadership. I will come back to each one of these later on. If we talk about learning organisations, it is very much about a local deregulation and a decentralisation of authority and responsibility down to lower levels; today the dominating line of development is 'team based organisations'. The teams are directed by goals, but are free to carry out the day to day work, and have the full authority to take care of customer contacts, supplier contacts, personal matters within the teams and so on. But I would very much like to emphasise that a learning organisation is not a certain organisational solution. It is a process, a process which never ends. It's about creating a culture, a way of working where everybody is engaged, and where everybody develops all the time. As one of our Chief Officers said, it is not enough anymore to use the hands and the feet of our employees, we must engage their brains and also their hearts. In several business groups today we have competence development, a dialogue between the manager and his associates and the development for every employee of individual competence plans. A routine is installed and in operation, so that every employee has his or her own competence plan. But these competence plans are not entirely about formal training programmes. They are very much about learning at work. The types of competence which are developed are first of all, of course, professional occupational competence, but also systems competence, to know about the whole in which I am a part, to understand where I come into the whole, a relations competence. What is very important to emphasise here is that no-one but the individual can be responsible for his or her competence development. It is not the case any more that management thinks for the employees and tells them what they should learn and whether they should learn. Every individual must continuously be hunting for new competence, and the management responsibility is to stimulate this and to make it possible when the proposals come. I think we are also facing new kinds of incentives to stimulate individuals' competence development. I think that more and more people should be paid according to what they can do and not according to what, at a certain moment, they do. New Training Role I would say a few words about the training establishment, if I dare to in this meeting. In companies, training experts are developing new roles. Instead of deciding what people should do, introducing training programmes and even deciding which people should participate in them, they are becoming more like facilitators, who are stimulating the line organisation and who are providing ideas, in policies and networks. Training programmes must become more and more custom made and there should be more 'just in time' learning, learning when you need it, when you desperately need it. This is not a dream, this is hard facts, this is the way it has to be in the tough war we are carrying out here. And the public systems around the company must be much more need-orientated, and maybe leave the concrete buildings and go out to work together with people. Leadership Leadership is different from management. There are many definitions. One definition I like very much is that management is about how to do, and leadership is about how to be. We have generally very good managers in my company and in European companies. I would say that here we can compete with anybody, but, at least in my country, we have paid very little attention to the managers' ability to be good leaders; that is now the number one on the agenda of the executive teams in our country, and it is a very thrilling subject. You cannot preach about it. It is a laboratory issue, where you yourself is the substance that is changing. 'Leaders' is a very good concept I think. You know, there have been many modern fashions, first it was management by control, then it was management by objectives, and then it was management by walking around, management by leadership. My suggestions is management by walking behind. You can see a dialogue emerge which very much is about visions and values, personal visions and how these personal visions fit together in something we want to achieve, and the values with which we are going to do this. Beyond Certainty Finally, I would just point out a few challenges in this development. This is a development which is going on proactively, very rapidly and it is very important to achieve a change of attitude to values and an understanding of how deep this position is, an understanding on all levels of a society. We also have to achieve a renewal of old regulations and structures. We have in work life, for example, in European work life, more hindering regulations than we have for example in the Far East or in US. One problem is that we are going to have to accept that this development takes us beyond certainty. The only prediction which will come true is that no prediction will come true. What they will think will happen tomorrow is going to be wrong, and that is the basis of what we have to accept. If we accept that, we must realise that we can no longer set up strategic plans about what to achieve and what to do. The only thing we can do in a time like this is to create a process, which is as well equipped as possible to cope with tomorrow, whatever tomorrow will be. But this is very difficult for us who are brought up in the scientific management paradigm. It is very easy to go backwards into the future, to try to apply approaches and methods from yesterday to tomorrow's problems, and that is most of all true, or at least also true, in a field of education and training. There was a time when we had stable overtime, occupations and jobs for which you could describe the knowledge which was needed to do them. We could produce training packages and we could take people to these training programmes and everything was fine. But that time does not exist any more. There are no standardised occupations and jobs any more. You cannot find them. Even if you go down to the shop floor and look into a team, it is changing all the time from day to day. This is, I think, the greatest challenge for all of us, to accept that we are in a break point time where tomorrow's approaches are wrong.
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