"A knowledge foundation enables people to unlearn and relearn. It enables them to put knowledge, skills and tools to work, rather than to one specific task in one specific way."
Knowledge is like an underground stream that will bubble up to the surface again and again. As Drucker says, someone founded on a foundation of knowledge will be in a constant state of learning and unlearning.
A good foundation will result in workers being able to take their skills and tool and adapt them to whatever comes their way. Of course a serious amount of experimentation and adjustment come along with that. But that's what successful businesses adopt as their way of doing business.
Effective business leaders will be on the lookup and help workers to continue with the balancing act of learning and unlearning. We need to be on the lookout for the very human tendency to want to dig in and settle down.
At the same time, we need to know when to temporarily sink our roots into something until it runs its course. If we never root into something, we won't have a successful business or department for long.
Each new idea, project or thought will require a change in how things are done. If we have a solid foundation in how to interact with new things, our people will be socialized into flowing relatively seamlessly from product to product or service to service as new information becomes available.
Learning and unlearning, is in itself a discipline. It's a balancing act that will never go away. Those that lay a foundation within a business to help their people be in a continuous flow, should be competitive in everything they attempt to do; assuming it's the right thing to be working on in the first place.
Other Peter Drucker Resources:
The Man Who Invented Management
Beyond the Information Revolution
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