Lifelong Learning
Arie de Geus
‘Your ability to learn faster than your competitor may be your only sustainable competitive advantage’, is a quote by Arie de Geus that I often use because of the great message it carries.
Arie de Geus gets my admiration because he is not a pure academic only. He started out in ‘the real world’ and progressed to management in Royal Dutch Shell, retiring after working there for 38 years.
He was largely responsible for developing the concept of the learning organisation. His reputation as an academic came after his publication ‘Planning as learning’ in the Harvard Business Review in 1988.
This is rather different to the many management consultants and academics and is best explained by an extract from Arie de Geus’ Website:
“…Business books fall into two main categories. By far the largest is written by academics and consultants, people who tend to be long on theory but short on real-world management experience. Less frequent are memoirs and “how to” guides written by career managers, in which anecdote too often substitutes for insight. There are, however, notable exceptions to the memoir rule. Books such as Alfred Sloan’s My Years at General Motors (1963) and The Living Company (1997) by Arie de Geus, former Shell manager, demonstrate that some multi-talented managers can cross the divide…”
My advice
While I don’t profess to be an Arie de Geus, my articles and advice are largely based on my own experience with Mind Maps and Mind Mapping in the business world, as well as in my studies. The MindMapTutor concept came into being with a collaboration with my wife. She was (and according to her, still is) a teacher. This collaboration enables both a practical, pragmatic approach as well as a strong academic base.
I work in the Information Technology sector and worked for many years as a contractor/consultant, being paid purely for my knowledge and skills in a fast changing career. A career, which needs constant, hard work to keep up to date and even harder work to stay ahead of the pack.
Even though I am a Senior Manager today, I still need to stay up to date with the latest thinking and happenings to ensure that I am constantly implementing world class solutions that deliver a competitive advantage.
Subscribing to the principles of Lifelong Learning is therefore of the utmost importance. If you want to be more successful in your field, starting with a lifelong learning mindset will already give you an advantage, as most people are complacent and coast along.
Leonardo da Vinci
Mind Maps are the ideal vehicle to manage your lifelong learning. It will not only enable you to learn faster, but also provide a link network in your brain that ensures that you start seeing the relationship between various disciplines. This is exactly how the great geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci thought. Da Vinci was a multi-disciplined individual and probably one of the greatest minds that ever lived.
If you have a look at some of his notes, you will see that he used a non-linear form of note taking that included words, images and symbols.
While his notes involved both the logical left brain and the creative right brain, they were not Mind Maps.
The Mind Map
The Mind Map is simply a more organised form of non linear note taking that involves the whole brain.
It is for this reason that I use Mind Maps in my everyday life. I use it for everything from brainstorming to running meetings, from project management to speeches.
I use Mind Maps in both my personal, academic and work life and have been doing this for nearly two decades.
Learning with Mind Maps
In the next few articles, I will be covering the use of Mind Maps in the learning process. This will give you an insight into learning faster than your competitors. Armed with this skill, you will be able to sustain a competitive advantage.
My use of Mind Maps may not always meet the Mind Map Principles of Tony Buzan, but neither did Leonardo da Vinci’s notes.
I look forward to sharing my knowledge of how I use Mind Maps to learn faster and maintain my competitive advantage in the next few articles.
Please feel free to add your comments, if you have similar experiences learning with Mind Maps. And please pass this on, if you feel somebody can benefit by being able to learn faster and easier.
