Why Can't We Get Anything Done?

3. Do you think that you can outthink the competition?

The good news is that companies are beginning to recognize that it's not only critical to know; it's also very important to do. We've been through the phase in which every company thought that it could outthink the competition. And, in fact, companies were able to outthink the competition -- for a while. But today, the advantage that you get from outthinking the competition lasts an incredibly short period of time. Put simply, the speed with which your competitors can copy even the best idea has increased much faster than the advantage that you get from having come up with that idea in the first place.

Look at what's happened with patents: The economic life span of most patents has decreased. The time lag between coming up with an idea, introducing that new idea to the market, and having it copied has decreased. And that's happening in a variety of industries, both in products and in services. So while having knowledge is useful, it's not sufficient. It gives you much less competitive leverage than it once did.

4. Doing means learning. Learning means mistakes.

If companies genuinely want to move from knowing to doing, they need to build a forgiveness framework -- a tolerance for error and failure -- into their culture. A company that wants you to come up with a smart idea, implement that idea quickly, and learn in the process has to be willing to cut you some slack. You need to be able to try things, even if you think that you might fail.

The absolute opposite mind-set is one that appears to be enjoying a lot of favor at the moment: the notion that we have to hold people accountable for their performance. Companies today are holding their employees accountable -- not only for trying and learning new things, but also for the results of their actions. If you want to see how that mind-set affects performance, compare the ways that American Airlines and Southwest Airlines approach accountability -- and then compare those two airlines' performances.

American Airlines has decided to emphasize accountability, right down to the departmental -- and even the individual -- level. If a plane is late, American wants to know whose fault it is. So if a plane is late, what do American employees do? They spend all of their time making sure that they don't get blamed for it. And while everyone is busy covering up, no one is thinking about the customer.

Southwest Airlines has a system for covering late arrivals: It's called "team delay." Southwest doesn't worry too much about accountability; it isn't interested in pinning blame. The company is interested only in getting the plane in the air and in learning how to prevent delays from happening in the future.

Now ask yourself this: If you're going to be held accountable for every mistake that you make, how many chances are you going to take? How eager are you going to be to convert your ideas into actions?

5. Have no fear.

One of the most pervasive emotions in the American workplace today is fear. The reason that there is so much fear is that everybody wants to build a learning organization, but nobody actually wants anyone to learn. Learning requires tolerating people who make mistakes. Learning requires tolerating inefficiency. Learning requires tolerating failure. Learning requires letting people try things that they've never done before, things that they probably won't be very good at the first time around.

Look at a company like AES Corp.: It's completely out of control! At AES, people are doing things that they've never done before, trying things that are beyond their existing abilities. Now, either you can ask, "How can they do that?" or you can ask, "Why doesn't everybody do that?" The only way that people can learn is by doing things that they've never done before. If we do only what we already know how to do, then we won't ever learn anything new.

6. Learning comes at a price. Pay it.

The truth is that there's no easy way to encourage people to learn. You have to accept the fact that there's always going to be a trade-off between proficiency and learning. Learners are never as proficient as experts. So learning comes at a price. The price is that the experts might not get to use their expertise and that the learners might make mistakes. Go back to AES. At AES, everyone thinks like a businessperson, and thousands of people are able to do lots of different things. But the company pays a price for that -- and the price that it pays is the cost of all of that learning. If you genuinely want to build a learning organization, you have to be prepared to make the necessary trade-offs and to pay the price.

7. Who me? I saw nothing! Honest!