Given the importance of the social dimension of imitation, the
techniques outlined above would appear to be particularly impor-
tant ones for you to acquire if you are to realize your potential.Learning online
The second most important attribute that Peter Honey and I dis-
covered was the ability to learn online. For most of us today, this is
an inescapable element of our business lives. It is a subject where
there is very little research into what works well and what does not.
In The Future of Corporate Learning, a survey for the UK’s
Department of Trade and Industry in 2000 that I co-wrote, we
described the ways in which e-learning is becoming significant in
almost all of the large organizations we looked at. Many of these had
opted to create corporate universities, often largely virtual. Many are
increasingly interested in how people actually learn. The British
company BAE Systems is a good example of this. With over 100,000
employees across nine home markets throughout the world, it has
not surprisingly decided to create a virtual university. It is significant
that BAE has a faculty of learning alongside its international busi-
ness school, its benchmarking and best practice center, and its more
predictable engineering, research, and technology centers.
In 2000, the UK University for Industry (Ufi), the first
government-backed e-university available to people of all educa-
tional backgrounds, was launched. Through a network of learning
centers in businesses and community groups, Ufi seeks to make
learning available in short courses online. And, of course, there are
many corporate universities based in the US and elsewhere that
have begun to offer electronic learning over the last decade.
To try to find out more about this aspect of learning to learn,
the Campaign for Learning, management consultants KPMG, Ufi,
and Peter Honey Learning recently collaborated on a survey of atti-
tudes to e-learning.
Almost all of the people in our sample had participated in
some kind of e-learning in the previous year. Their overall reactions
toward e-learning were largely positive, with 90 percent feeling that112 Power Up Your Mind
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