There’s always a war of dual states. It’s always waterfall project management versus agile project management. Static strategies versus Emergent strategies. I love to believe that in the end, all strategies regardless of how they begin, they end up as emergent strategies. Precisely because the ground is always shifting. There can’t be one controlled course to that objective end.
Thus, I believe the best strategy is that which emerges out of a learning organization. A learning organization is adaptable, flexible, and resilient. When a culture is built around these elements, that every element in the organization will learn faster than competition, that it will get better every minute, then that over time transforms the organization.
The one thing organizations often forget once they achieve success, it’s their ability to learn. They become so sold to what worked in the past. They forget that the DNA of the success was in the learning, being able to learn faster. Contrary to popular belief, learning is extremely hard, even for the smartest of individuals. In fact, the more people know, the harder it is to flex and learn more and faster.
At Oripler Foods, this has been the success. We’ve always prioritized the learning curve. You can never ignore the advantages that accrue from growing faster on the learning curve. Because most advantages precisely boil down to how one grows on that learning curve and how fast they can bend that curve.
What is the number one job of a CEO today? It should be to build a learning platform. If every department gets better by 1%, it makes the adjacent systems get better in multiplier effects. Imagine a better logistics operation? Imagine better predictive analytics? Imagine a company that just learns to forecast better?
The advantage is in learning to learn.
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