In 1988, the San Jose State College of Engineering established a center for Process and Quality Improvement (P&QI). The center’s mandate was to identify and enhance the knowledge and skills of engineering graduates in areas critical to the success of Silicon Valley Companies, and to provide educational services to those companies to enhance the needed knowledge and skills within their organizations. Companies who supported and participated in this effort included Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Intel, Apple Computer, Applied Materials and Lockheed Martin. For a period of twelve years, the P&QI Center worked with Silicon Valley companies to identify and clarify knowledge and skill areas that needed to be enhanced and to upgrade university courses to meet these needs. This information was also used to develop courses and workshops to enhance the knowledge and skills of engineers already working for Silicon Valley companies.
The Organizational Learning Center was founded in May 1992 by Dr. Robert McQueen, the Director of the P & QI Center, and two other P & QI Center associates Laura Uden and Phil Turner. Ron Murata replaced Phil in 1995. OLC was established as a non-profit company with the mission of providing services to business and industry that would help them to improve and sustain high performance levels.
A priority requirement for business and industry was to improve the agility of their organizations to respond to changing circumstances, and to improve the creativity and innovation within their organization. It was clear to the founders of the Organizational Learning Center that the primary deterrent to improving agility, creativity and innovation within industry was the well-established top-down, command and control management system. This system served business and industry well in the past when the rate of change was relatively slow and the marketplace less competitive, but it is not what’s needed for today’s rapidly changing market place.
Over the past twenty years, OLC has focused on understanding what management system is most effective in fully utilizing knowledge worker capabilities, and identifying cost-effective methods for establishing that management system. We refer to the management system that we and others advocate as a “process-based partnership management system” and its culture as a “learning organization culture”.
We believe that we now have sufficient experience in implementing this management system. We wish to invite those involved in OD, Business Process Management and Organizational Change to become associated with the Organizational Learning Center and gain access to utilizing the tools and methods we have developed.