compartmentalized, the transfer of ideas across the organization is
stifled, thereby reducing the alignment needed to achieve corpo-
rate renewal. In addition, when initiatives such as coaching and
change management are outsourced to consultants, the forgetting
curve of the organization moves faster than the learning curve.
Steve Mercer at the new Boeing Leadership Center boasts that the
center has had full managing board involvement over the past two
years on every event. Leaders at the center have redesigned all gen-
eral management programs to focus on business-driven action
learning and benchmarking against world-class companies. They
align program schedules to reinforce the strategy, to encourage for-
mal and informal contacts between program delegates, and to
develop coaches that are professional enough to work part time in
other companies. When recast as a networked marketplace and a
crossroads for ideas, the overall mind-set of the leaders is shifted to
just-in-time learning on demand, where leaders take an active role
in design, delivery, and coaching.
How Effective Are Your Leaders at Guiding
the Internal Marketplace?In a world of fast-moving and changing relationships, where lever-
aging knowledge and information in a global arena is the ticket to
play, leaders must reorient their attention to the internal market-
place for money, talent, and ideas if they hope to capture the ben-
efits of bigness. Simply put, of these three markets, ideas are the
most important source of competitive uniqueness. When ideas get
locked up in organizational boundaries, point-scoring, not-
invented-here resistance, and slow cycle times, the whole system of
trust and informal sharing breaks down. When leaders act as
brokers, when they use meetings as a marketplace and an opportu-
nity for alignment, and when they build proper infrastructures and
trusting leadership support, ideas can move quickly to reinforce
alignment and tipping points in the organization.
110 LEADINGORGANIZATIONALLEARNING