HBR's 10 Must Reads on Lifelong Learning

by Harvard Business Review, Carol S. Dweck, Marcus Buckingham

Create and sustain a culture of learning. If you read nothing else on learning, read these 10 articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you keep your skills fresh and relevant, support continuous improvement on your team, and prepare everyone in the organization to thrive over the long term. This book will inspire you

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Personal Development, Education, Audiobook, Leadership

192 pages, Paperback

Published May 25, 2021

Reviews

[Danijela Jerković · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes on HBR's 10 Must Reads on Lifelong Learning...

“Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.”
~Mark Twain



1: Learning to Learn
by Erika Andersen

The secret ingredients: aspiration, self-awareness, curiosity, and vulnerability.

The ability to acquire new skills and knowledge quickly and continually is crucial to success in a world of rapid change. If you don’t currently have the aspiration, self-awareness, curiosity, and vulnerability to be an effective learner, these simple tools can help you get there.


"Commit yourself to lifelong learning. The most valuable asset you'll ever have is your mind and what you put into it."
~Albert Einstein



2: Making Yourself Indispensable
by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott K. Edinger

Good leaders can become exceptional by developing just a few of their strengths to the highest level— but not by merely doing more of the same. Instead, they need to engage in the business equivalent of cross-training— that is, to enhance complementary skills that will enable
them to make fuller use of their strengths.

Once a few of their strengths have reached the level of outstanding, leaders become indispensable
to their organizations, despite the weaknesses, they may have.

Building Strengths, Step by Step ...
As a practical matter, cross-training for leadership skills is clear-cut:
(1) Identify your strengths.
(2) Choose a strength to focus on according to its importance to the organization and how
passionately you feel about it.
(3) Select a complementary behavior you’d like to enhance.
(4) Develop it in a linear way.

People constantly growing into ever-changing roles create an organization that becomes more resilient even as it improves the execution of its current strategy.


“We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.”
~Peter Drucker



3: Find the Coaching in Criticism
by Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone

Feedback is crucial.
It improves performance, develops talent, aligns expectations, solves problems, guides promotion and pay, and boosts the bottom line.

6 steps to turn feedback into an important, and unthreatening, tool:
1: Know your tendencies.
2: Separate the “what” from the “who.”
3: Sort toward coaching.
4: Unpack the feedback.
5: Request and direct feedback.
6: Experiment.

Criticism is never easy to take— but learning to pull value from it is essential to your development and success.

Your growth depends on your ability to pull value from criticism in spite of your natural responses and on your willingness to seek out even more advice and coaching from bosses, peers, and subordinates.


“It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.” 
~Claude Bernard



4: Teaching Smart People How to Learn
by Chris Argyris

Success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn.

Problem-solving is an example of single-loop learning. You identify an error and apply a particular
remedy to correct it. But genuine learning involves an extra step, in which you reflect on your assumptions and test the validity of your hypotheses.
Achieving this double-loop learning is more than a matter of motivation— you have to reflect
on the way you think.

Failure forces you to reflect on your assumptions and inferences.
This is why an organization’s smartest and most successful employees are often such poor learners: they haven’t had the opportunity for introspection that failure affords. So when they do fail— or merely underperform— they can be surprisingly defensive.
Instead of critically examining their own behavior, they cast blame outward— on anyone or anything they can.

People often profess to be open to critique and new learning, but their actions suggest a very
a different set of governing values or theories- in-use:
• The desire to remain in unilateral control
• The goal of maximizing “winning” while minimizing “losing”
• The belief that negative feelings should be suppressed
• The desire to appear as rational as possible

Taken together, these values betray a profoundly defensive posture: a need to avoid embarrassment, the threat, or feelings of vulnerability and incompetence.


“The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.”
~B.B. King



5: The Feedback Fallacy
by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall

The Challenge ...
Managers today are bombarded with calls to give feedback— constantly, directly, and critically.
But it turns out that telling people what we think of their performance and how they can do better is not the best way to help them excel and, in fact, can hinder development.

The Reality ...
Research shows that first, we aren’t the reliable raters of other people’s performance that we think we are; second, criticism inhibits the brain’s ability to learn; and, third, excellence is idiosyncratic, can’t be defined in advance, and isn’t the opposite of failure.
Managers can’t “correct” a person’s way to excellence.

The Solution...
Managers need to help their team members see what’s working, stopping them with a “Yes! That!”
and sharing their experience of what the person did well.

We humans do not do well when someone whose intentions are unclear tells us where we stand, how good we “really” are, and what we must do to fix ourselves. We excel only when people who know us and care about us tell us what they experience and what they feel, and in particular when they see something within us that really works.


"He who laughs most learns best.”
~John Cleese



6: The Leader as Coach
by Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular

The Situation...
To cope with disruptive change, companies are reinventing themselves as learning organizations.
This requires a new approach to management in which leaders serve as coaches to those they supervise.

The Challenge...
In this new approach, managers ask questions instead of providing answers, support employees
instead of judging them, and facilitate their development instead of dictating what has to
be done. But most managers don’t feel they have time for that— and they’re not very good at it anyway.

The Solution...
Companies need to offer their managers the appropriate tools and support to become better
coaches. And if they want to be sustainably healthy learning organizations, they must also develop
coaching as an organizational capacity.


“Change is the end result of all true learning.”
~ Leo Buscaglia



7: Strategies for Learning from Failure
by Amy C. Edmondson

The wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible. Yet organizations that do it well are extraordinarily rare.

The ingrained attitude that all failures are bad means organizations doesn’t learn from them.

Leaders need to recognize that failures occur on a spectrum from blameworthy to praiseworthy, and
that they fall into three categories:
• Failures in routine or predictable operations, which can be prevented
• Those in complex operations, which can’t be avoided but can be managed so that they don’t
mushroom into catastrophes
• Unwanted outcomes in, for example, research settings, which are valuable because they generate
knowledge

Although learning from failures requires different strategies in different work settings, the goal should be to detect them early, analyze them deeply, and design experiments or pilot projects to produce them. But if the organization is ultimately to succeed, employees must feel safe admitting to and reporting failures. Creating that environment takes strong leadership.

In short, exceptional organizations are those that go beyond detecting and analyzing failures and try to generate intelligent ones for the express purpose of learning and innovating. It’s not that
managers in these organizations enjoy failure. But they recognize it as a necessary by-product of experimentation. They also realize that they don’t have to do dramatic experiments with large budgets. Often a small pilot, a dry run of a new technique, or a simulation will suffice.

The courage to confront our own and others’ imperfections are crucial to solving the apparent contradiction of wanting neither to discourage the reporting of problems nor to create an environment in which anything goes.

Those that catch, correct, and learn from failure before others do will succeed. Those that wallow in the blame game will not.


"He who laughs most learns best.”
~ John Cleese



8: Learning in the Thick of It
by Marilyn Darling, Charles Parry, and Joseph Moore

Like many managers, you probably conduct after-action reviews (AARs) to extract lessons from key projects and apply them to others. But in most companies, AARs don’t fulfill their promise: Scrapped projects, poor investments, and failed safety measures repeat themselves— while hoped-for gains rarely materialize.

One manufacturing executive, reading an AAR report for a failed project that had stumbled twice
before, realized with horror that the team was “discovering” the same mistakes all over again.

How to transform your AARs from diagnoses of past failure into aids for future success?
Realize that looking for lessons isn’t the same as learning them. View the AAR as an ongoing learning process— rather than a one-time meeting, report, or postmortem.

Set the stage for AARs with rigorous before-action planning— articulating your intended results,
anticipated challenges, and lessons from previous similar situations.

Conduct mini- AARs after each project milestone— holding everyone accountable for applying key
lessons quickly in the next project phase.

Companies that master this process gain— and sustain—
competitive advantage. They avoid repeating the kinds of errors that gnaw away at stakeholder value. And instead of merely fixing problems, they adapt more rapidly and effectively than rivals to challenges no one even imagined.

To improve your AAR process:

- Build Your AAR Regimen Slowly.
- Conduct a Before-Action Review (BAR).
- Conduct Mini- BARs, and AARs.
- Focus on Your Own Team’s Learning

It takes multiple iterations to produce solutions that stand up under any conditions.

In an environment where conditions change constantly, knowledge is always a work in progress. So creating, collecting, and sharing knowledge is the responsibility of the people who can apply it.
Knowledge is not a staff function.

˝Being a student is easy. Learning requires actual work.”
~William Crawford



9: Is Yours a Learning Organization?
by David A. Garvin, Amy C. Edmondson, and Francesca Gino

With tougher competition, technology advances, and shifting customer preferences, it’s more crucial than ever that companies become learning organizations. In a learning organization, employees continually create, acquire, and transfer knowledge— helping their company adapt to the unpredictable faster than rivals can.

But few companies have achieved this ideal. Why? Managers don’t know the precise steps for building a learning organization. And they lack tools for assessing whether their teams are learning or how that learning is benefiting the company.

Garvin, Edmondson, and Gino propose a solution. First, understand the three building blocks required for creating learning organizations:

1) a supportive environment,
2) concrete learning processes, and
3) leadership that reinforces learning.

Then use the authors’ diagnostic tool, the Learning Organization Survey, to determine how well, your team, department, or the entire company is performing with each building block.

By assessing performance on each building block, you pinpoint areas needing improvement, moving your company that much closer to the learning organization ideal.

The goal of our organizational learning tool is to promote dialogue, not critique. All the organizations we studied found that reviewing their survey scores was a chance to look into a mirror.

The learning organization survey is best used not merely as a report card or bottom-line score but rather as a diagnostic instrument— in other words, as a tool to foster learning.


“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
~Mahatma Gandhi



10: Why Organizations Don’t Learn
by Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats


The Problem...
Even companies dedicated to continuous improvement struggle to stay on the path. Research suggests that’s because of deeply ingrained biases: We focus too much on success, take action
too quickly, try too hard to fi t in, and depend too much on outside experts.

The Impediments...
These biases manifest themselves in 10 conditions that impede learning. These include fear of failure, insufficient refl ection, believing that we need to conform, and inadequate frontline involvement in addressing problems.

The Solutions...
Leaders can use a variety of strategies to counter the biases, including stressing that mistakes
are learning opportunities, building more breaks into schedules, helping employees identify and apply their personal strengths, and encouraging employees to own problems that aff ect them.

It may be cheaper and easier in the short run to ignore failures, schedule work so that there’s no time for refl ection, require compliance with organizational norms, and turn to experts for quick solutions. But these short- term approaches will limit the organization’s ability to learn.


“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
~Benjamin Franklin




The Transformer CLO
by Abbie Lundberg and George Westerman


The Situation
The fast- changing nature of business today means that employees’ continual learning is vital for organizational success

The Response...
Chief learning offi cers are assuming a more expansive role, aiming not only to train employees but also to transform their organizations’ capabilities and make learning an integral part of the
company’s strategic agenda.

The Specifics...
Extensive interviews at 19 large companies revealed that “transformer CLOs”—those who are
embracing this expanded role— are driving changes in their enterprises’ learning goals, learning methods, and learning departments.


“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
~Dr. Seuss



BONUS DIGITAL ARTICLE
The Right Mindset for Success
An interview with Carol Dweck by Sarah Green Carmichael

Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset...

A fixed mindset is when people believe their basic qualities— their intelligence, their talents,
their abilities— are just fi xed traits. They have a certain amount, and that’s that.
But other people have a growth mindset . They believe that even basic talents and abilities can be developed over time through experience, mentorship, and so on. These are the people who go for
it. They’re not always worried about how smart they are, how they’ll look, what a mistake will mean. They challenge themselves and grow.


“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”
~Henry Ford


"Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune.” 
~ Jim Rohn

[Grigori Paslari · Rating 4 out of 5]

The biggest shift I had as a result of reading this book, is around giving feedback. I was super surprised to read that constructive feedback we are struggling to learn to give is not helpful, getting out of your comfort zone is slowing down your learning in general, and the more feedback to collect the less value it has... The only reason I tend to believe it is cause they say you don't have to have negative feedback, it is ok, it is even more helpful, and this is my current state being in the middle of the performance review.

Quote from the article - Why Feedback Rarely Does What It’s Meant To:
"Learning rests on our grasp of what we're doing well, not on what we're doing poorly, and certainly not on someone else's sense of what we're doing poorly"

[Supriyo Chaudhuri · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have lost my appetite for reading business books, primarily as most of them promote a single-idea solution (which can be covered in 10 pages instead of the customary 200) to all of world's problems! On that count, HBR's Must Reads are great - at least I get 10 ideas! This one covers a lot of ground and have some great articles in it. In at least one instance, one commentary critiques an article in the same collection - what a treat that is! So, in summary, interesting ideas including some really useful ones, not mono-tonal like other business literature and deals with an uncommon subject - a must read indeed!

[Susan Wilson]

A good reminder on The Feedback Fallacy, particularly approaching “giving feedback” more as “here’s my reaction”. Love the definition of curiosity as “what makes us try something until we can do it or think about something until we understand it”. Agree that learning best approach as developing mindsets/behaviour (like cultivating curiosity and growth mindset) so people can perform tasks in the future not yet known (rather than training skills). I am advocate of face to face training but the framing of this as exclusive and considering a more blended, or online approach as it is more democratic, really gave me something to think about.

[Timothy Batson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Keeping those professional skills sharp!

This, and I imagine the rest of the HBR series, is best consumed through print or digital, with the associated workshop/book materials. I listened to this on audio, and while it was well presented, I knew I was missing some element of the material being covered.

Lots of known info in here in learning, and how to change culture in the workplace to be accepting of learning. I'm glad there were many things I already practiced as a long-term manager that were addressed in this book *pats self on back, as well as good ideas to implement in the future.

[Jae · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started this book in the hope that I could find more advice on how to be a life long learner. yet the book is divided into three parts, how to learn as a professional, how to encourage learning in your team, and how to keep a learning mindset in an organization. obviously each part has its own focus and being an independent contributor in my team makes me feel that half of the book didn't apply to my current situation. however, for the ones that do apply, I find them quite helpful.

some of the articles are bit outdated in my opinion.

[Kelevilin Kimathi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lifelong learning

This book talks about something everyone has to do to remain relevant in this fast changing career landscape. To thrive you have yo develop a growth mindset where you are not afraid to take risks.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book brings great articles on learning, leadership and personal development .
Definitely one of my favorite books on the HBR’s series.

[Raka Adrianto · Rating 4 out of 5]

As expected, this is a short and crisp compendium of articles with hidden insights. The brevity of HBR time and again is a winning element.

[Alya AlShaibani · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75

[Julian Roza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting articles but feel a bit repetative at times which make it a bit boring.

[Yana Orekhova · Rating 4 out of 5]

“…getting attention to our strengths from others catalyzes learning, whereas attention to our weaknesses smothers it.”
Couldn’t agree more.