How does the electric enterprise learning?

By Mia

I have served an internship at a local electric company. As a high-tech enterprise, which need to update of information constantly. So, organization's learning is very important in the enterprise development process. Employees not only have a clear division of labour, but also job responsibilities in electric power companies. It is possible to solve the employees know the problem of "what to do", but from another point of view, it limited staff to go beyond the scope of organization. The creativity of the employees are less likely to be played. How to break the rigid pattern? The leaders re-examine the significance of power, so it appears the phenomenon of right differentiation in decision-making and management of enterprise development. Give full play to each employee's intelligence, and to raise the level of decision-making and effectiveness. Another change was to encourage innovation and creativity. Staff encouragement has also experienced the change from the simple, extensive model to the subtle and detailed one, which puts forward higher requirements for staff encouragement to further explore the subjective capability of staffs to motivate the enthusiasm, emotion, passion and motivation of staffs, and to improve the organizational performance.

I was impressed by the activities of "safe production month" carried out under arrangements of the State Grid. To power businesses, security is the life and efficiency, security is the most important thing in all the work! So, security is always a power of course people need to learn. In just two months, we organized eight of the safety regulations for our organization. In the process of learning, not only we study with the work-related safety regulations, but also highlighted other systems. Everyone review objectives and performance, find the faults and weaknesses, and to recommend appropriate measures. This makes me felt the crews pay attention to the safety of works deeply. Indeed, only we constantly learn to enhance own security awareness, we can transfer from "I will be safe" to " I want to be safe".

How does "The City University of Hong Kong" learn?

By Corrine

Learning internally:

CityU adopts Blackboard Learn (Bb) as the unified e-learning platform. The IT platform is persistently being upgraded and expanded to enable a technologically advance and pedagogically rich e-learning environment according to the needs of teachers and students. To assist teachers and students to learn, there are various user guides on the web, and e-learning workshops for various levels of users. The University also provides a number of tools for e-learning, such as “campuspack”, “turnitin”, “safe assign”, and the “Wimba voice tools”, which support traditional communicative styles of language learning, it humanizes and personalizes the online courses by using threaded voice boards, live group discussions, etc.

Learning externally:

There is a Knowledge Transfer Office (KTO) serving as a vital link between the institution and the community in terms of the exchange of knowledge, which includes IT, know-how, skills and expertise, for both commercial and non-commercial applications. Through knowledge transfer, the Office aims at forging close ties with industry, business and the public. It plays an important role in the protection, dissemination, exchange, and commercialization of knowledge that the institution created for the economy and social well-being of the community.

On How Work is Organized

By Rainbow

I have been working in a trade company before. I think it is well organized. There are different departments responsible for different businesses such as human resources department, merchandize department, shipping department, QC department,etc. Every department cooperates and coordinates with each other for the management of the whole company. Every department is responsible for their own job. Every department is divided into smaller teams and every team has a manager.The manager assign tasks to subordinates. The team members do their jobs individually or by two or three together. The subordinates should write reports on how the jobs are done. The managers will give instructions and strategies on how to deal the problems emerging in the process. I think the shared vision theory fits very well here.

This collective discipline establishes a focus on mutual purpose. People with a common purpose can learn to nourish a sense of commitment in a group or organization by developing shared images of the future they seek to create and the principles and guiding practices by which they hope to get there. A school or community that hopes to live by learning needs a common shared vision process. As the job is done team-based, so they share a focus on mutual purpose. They must work hard and together to reach the goal of the whole team.

I think systems thinking is very important in both working and learning. If the job is done as a team, so with the joint efforts there will be growth and stability. The job is to be carried out like a learning process and people will learn from each other and deepen the professional knowledge and implementation of the current job. It is also a kind of constructive learning.

workplace--learning orgsaniation?

By Fay
I have ever done a part-time internship for almost one year in CCTV (China Central Television) at Beijing with a not high salary. My response was to assist the programme director to film.

The whole producing team consisted of young people, and the atmosphere was alive and equal. This team intakes many interns each year in order to refresh the creating blood. Meanwhile, interns could learn much real and practical stuff there. I was one of them.

The following table analyzes KWL model of my previous job.

What I already know?	What I want to know?	What I have learnt?
Some basic filming knowledge. Not very skilled filming skills.	Professional filming skills How to coordinate scenes How to lead the whole team to work smoothly	Professional filming skills Working with others better. Dealing with some emergencies. ……

In this workplace, there was no very strictly working distribution structure.

·  People will learn more if they work harder and communicate with others more. For interns, we could learn lots of fresh knowledge by even watching. In this organization, personal mastery was accomplished well. This target acquired did not separate with shared vision. The functioning of this organization was transparent; we did discuss issues in an equal and freedom way. Thus, as the filming going, innovation could appear gradually, and some basic rules were executed well without forcing. The tacit understanding could be found which was interesting and power saving. However there was a not that welcomed thing always happened, which was the inspection system of TV system in China. Usually, our great ideas were killed by producers due to some hard-explained reason here.

·  As we were a team of young, the system thinking was not carried out very well. Although these shortages cannot be seen from the screen. We had to have many meeting for one shooting. Trying our best to forecast what will happen. Perhaps due to the emergencies always appear for TV making, we had to deal with some situation we had not thought before.

·  Above all, this is a long story, the place I have ever worked can be called a not bad learning organization.

Learning organization existed anytime and anyplace

By Emma

After reading the five learning disciplines, I discovered many learning organizations can be found around us. Here, firstly, I want to reflect briefly but comprehensively what I have learned about learning disciplines proposed by Senge et al.

In the book, he strengthened that one good learning organization should be included five parts:

(1) personal mastery: individuals need to have their own visions, cultivating and developing themselves in certain areas to achieve higher aims and create life.

(2) shared vision: we have found that most people do not like sharing information with others, especially personal issues. People like hiding something or putting themselves in shadow. But in fact, learning is a process of interaction. There is a proverb, ‘Three bad smell cobbler, carry pieces of Zhu Ge-liang’, which means the team power is huge. people with a common purpose can learn to nourish a sense of commitment in a group or organization by developing shared images of the future they seek to create and the principles and guiding practices by which they hope to get there.

(3) mental models: Working with mental models can help you more clearly and honestly define current reality. But one thing needs to be considered, one organization should guarantee talk freedom or talk safely, promoting brainstorm and proper argument, so that the organization can grow up much quicker and better.

(4) team leading: team members in one organization need to communicate and share information with others more often, leaders should encourage fellows more think, more talk, more create.

(5) system thinking: we inspire thinking more, but if fellows do some mythical void at all, it’s invalid and insignificant. Therefore, people learn to better understand interdependency and change and thereby are able to deal more effectively with forces that shape the consequences of their actions.

I am going to take my father’s company- motor component manufacturer as my research object.

The organization structure as follow

The organization structure
Boss
Marketing department	Financial department	Administration department	Product lines	Warehouse section

I can say in every department, there existed one learning organization. Product line is a little special, every line can be seen as a section, and every line can be called one learning organization, which is judged by Senge’s five learning principles.

Take one product line for example.

every employee has their own dream on working—raise salary, but it depends on the quantity and quality of the product they can make. So on the promise, they have to learn more technical things to improve their skill, which enlightens their working passion and inspires them to learn more . furthermore, it makes them do more communicating and enquiring with other experienced workers. In the working days, I can see workers talk and learn mutually with chief manager or colleagues often. All in all, the organization has a good learning environment.

P.S.Group learning

Here, I would like to share my story of learning together with classmates. In my previous school, teacher recommended team working, especially for the course of business case study. Before the final report and presentation, team members need to do much work, such as current situation research of certain corporation, data collection, potential problem existing in the company, solution proposing, etc. In the process, we learnt together on the culture of corporation, brainstormed about the possible reasons of success or failure of certain products or services, took best advantage of theoretical knowledge. Sometimes we proposed questions and doubted on the opinion of members, sometimes we gave support on members’ ideas, which improved our capability of analysis and helped us take care more aspects to see problems.

I am impressed that learning and discuss in one group can correct some wrong concepts, and the explanation from classmates is more directed and clear than teacher’ sometimes (because teachers are more inclined to use professional words to take lecture to reflect their professionalism I think).

What’s more, learning in a group can increase efficiency, but on the basis, all members should have a responsibility on information sharing and collecting, not just sit and steal others’ fruits in order to finish assignment or something else.