Question description

 

Home Page

The learning and growth perspective focuses on capacities the organization must develop to create long-term growth and value. This perspective is unique among the four in having an orientation more toward the future, which is of course unknown and indeed unknowable, rather than toward a present that, while it may be unclear, is at least in principle determinable. These capacities include the ability to innovate, improve, and learn. And these capacities are important in order for any organization to succeed. An organization that is not learning and growing internally, and that is not providing opportunities for its employees to learn and grow as well, is not likely to survive in today's competitive world.

 

There are three main areas that encompass the learning and growth perspective:

 

People

Systems

Organizational procedures

Robert Kaplan and David Norton (1996) suggest the following as measures:

 

People

Employee satisfaction

Employee retention

Employee training

Employee skills

Systems

Real-time availability of accurate customer and internal process information to front-line employees

Ability to launch new products

Ability to create more value for customers

Ability to penetrate new markets

Organizational procedures

Alignment of employee incentives with overall organizational success factors

Rates of improvement in critical customer-based and internal processes

 

Assignment

The home page of this module identifies several measures of the learning and growth perspective, such as

 

Real-time availability of accurate customer and internal process information to front-line employees

Ability to launch new products

Ability to create more value for customers

Ability to penetrate new markets

Alignment of employee incentives with overall organizational success factors

Rates of improvement in critical customer-based and internal processes

Consideration of these measures reveals that it can be difficult to quantify these factors. For your first posting in this Discussion, identify one specific example of a measure of learning and growth measure that you feel could be critical to an organization, but difficult to measure. For your second and third posting, choose another student's measure and propose a metric that could be used to quantify it.

 

Please note that you need to have at least three posts in this Discussion forum.