In this past 20 years, Microsoft was practicing the knowledge management. For Microsoft to build up a learning organization's strategy, it can be concluded into 3 ideals and 4 principles which suggested by "Microsoft secret". The first ideal is self-criticism. The second ideal is message feedback. And the third one is a wide-ranging exchange. Now, I introduce an example which held in Microsoft. One of the Microsoft managers promoted their product in a fair and won 9 prizes out of 10 prizes. After that, this manager sent an e-mail to his team members to announce this good news. However, he got the feedback from his members not said "congratulation" that kind's formal sentence. They asked "Why we couldn't get the last prize?" "What we could learn from this fair?" "How could we get that last prize in next year?" From this example, we may see that the employees in Microsoft could practice these three ideals.
Historic Microsoft photo of Paul Allen (left) and ...
Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum ,2007.
Microsoft BuildingThey always try to improve themselves and avoid having those mistakes again, concern the feedbacks and always take an active role in discussing the work-related issues. Also, Microsoft forms a "Post-Mortem" as a platform to give their employees discussing their work-related issues and suggesting how to improve. For the 4 principles, the first one is learning from the past and on-going projects systematically. The second principle is using standardize statistics to improve their products. The third principle is customer-oriented and uses their feedback for improvement. The fourth principle is to encourage department collaboration and resource sharing. Let take the example in Microsoft, they always let the customers get the trial to use the new product and encourage them to give the feedback. Although some feedbacks were negative and complain, but Microsoft always welcome it and strive to improve it, sometimes they may get "thank-you letter"...