2.10 This will require a shift away from the crude, entirely market-driven and sometimes threatening rhetoric which has too often informed the debate about change at work, with its implied lack of alternatives or choice for both individuals and companies. The major changes we have charted can be responded to with imagination, in a number of ways, far more successfully than with knee-jerk brutality. It can be done partly by meeting them through expanding opportunities and capacities for learning. That means not merely tidying up previous policies and giving them a fresh lick of paint. It requires a shift of emphasis and an alteration of focus.

2.11 Achieving this will entail profound changes in our culture and our approach to the world of work, as many successful businesses have already demonstrated in their commitment to becoming 'learning organisations'. It will mean a switch of emphasis in our assumptions, in people's aspirations, in funding and in provision. We need to change our whole approach to achievement and its measurement and even the very language and vocabularies we use to describe learning opportunities. Above all, it means giving far greater emphasis to the contribution which learning can make to enabling people and organisations to cope with far-reaching transformations, some of which we have scarcely yet discerned, and turning them to advantage.

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