On Organizational Learning

by Chris Argyris

This book is essential for anyone who needs to understand how organizations work, evolve, and learn. In this new edition, Argyris discusses vital topics of current management research, such as tacit knowledge and management, so reflecting the evolving field of organizational learning.

Genres: Business, Leadership, Nonfiction, Management, Psychology

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Chris Argyris is a director of elite strategy consulting firm, the Monitor Group, and is the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School.

Agyris's early research focused on the unintended consequences for individuals of formal organizational structures, executive leadership, control systems, and management information systems, and on how individuals adapted to change those consequences. He then turned his attention to ways of changing organizations, especially the behavior of executives at the upper levels of organization.

During the past decade, Argyris has been developing, a theory of individual and organizational learning in which human reasoning (not just behavior) becomes the basis for diagnosis and action.

Reviews

[Christiane ChristianeP]

This book helps understand why and how orgnaisations are sometimes misled by their excessive use of non factual assumptions based on feelings or pre-conceived ideas, but not on facts and figures.

An effective thinking process should start with the analysis of real data.

On another plan, the book emphasises the importance of the error correction process, which is essential to avoid repeating the mistakes.

Those simple questions are essential: "why did this error happen? What are the root causes?

Even if the book is not recent, it provides us with a good understanding of some fundamental concepts.

[Ks Pillai · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best book of Chris, Change Managers guide