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Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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Learning from the past is more relevant and productive in stable markets ruled by the law of diminishing returns than it is in tumultuous markets characterized by technological discontinuities and positive-feedback loops (increasing returns).

Learning from the future is less about processing information and more about structuring it and seeing patterns in it. It's less concerned with making plans than with producing capabilities. It is, as I said, a subtle distinction, but one worth making.

The ultimate business objective of learning should be to systematically accelerate a company's natural rate of improvement in value created for the customers it targets.

Managed learning is a more efficient and effective means of achieving the strategic agenda that leverages the natural dynamics of organizational change and knowledge creation and use.

Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it... This then is the basic meaning of a 'learning organization' - an organization that is continuously expanding its capacity to create its future.

Learning has to do with integrating information into your own internal framework so you own it within your own conceptual space. That means you have to engage in some kind of action with the knowledge being transferred to you.

Ultimately, e-learning will be most effective when it no longer feels like learning -- when it's simply a natural part of how people work: Today, people say, 'I'm working,' and what they're doing is quickly answering emails and voice mails. They don't say, 'I've got the next two hours slotted for email.' If you do things in small chunks, they become just another part of your job. We want learning to become just another part of people's jobs. E-learning will be successful when it doesn't have its own name.

I make an important distinction between CEOs who are effective teachers and CEOs who are effective leaders of the learning processes of their organizations. A teacher imparts a point of view, a perspective, a vision, a set of guidelines - it's communication from the expert to the novice. Meanwhile a CEO who leads the learning process of others, creates a learning culture, cultivates learning processes and actively leads dialogue and discussion - often with an unclear endpoint.

One problem with how most companies deliver information is that they expect people to spend too much time at one sitting. We work in a world of limited attention spans, unlimited demands on people's time, and endless multitasking. Learning programs have to reflect these realities: most e-learning is still anchored in the mind-set that learning means going somewhere for 8 hours at a time to study a 40-hour curriculum. We may have a 40-hour curriculum, but we deliver it in 20-minute chunks, or even faster. That makes it easier for people to build learning into their workday.

If you know one (of anything), that's it: You know one. But if you know two, you know much, much more than two. With two computer languages, not only do you know both languages, but you also know what makes them similar, what makes them different, what you like best and least about each, and how each is better suited for certain tasks.

Call it the "epiphany of multiples." I'm not a linguist or a musician, but I have been told by those who are that the same miracle holds true in these fields: Learning your second language or instrument opens a door to learning multiple languages or instruments more easily than the first or the second.

Similarly, consultants have often worked in many companies, countries, industries, functional areas or technologies. This wide-ranging exposure has given them the perspective that can generate valuable innovations. This perspective, in turn, helps them tackle challenges or realize opportunities that would be overlooked by someone with twice the experience but without the epiphany of multiples.

My definition of learning follows the behavioral model. That is, learning hasn't really taken place until it's reflected in changed behaviors, skills, and attitudes. So our approach to education and training is focused on changing the skills and behavior of employees, and our focus is not on teaching, but on learning.

At the root of team and organizational learning is conversational exchange - how do we accurately communicate to each other what's going on in our minds and what's going on in reality? The human tendency is to assess prematurely the meaning of what people are saying or not saying and why they are saying or not saying it. There is also a tendency not to be forthcoming about our own weaknesses and mistakes. These tendencies are powerful impediments to learning in groups.

If you lead a largely unexamined life, you will eventually hit a wall. Some barriers can be invisible until you smack into them. The key, then, is to investigate the wall inside yourself, so you can go beyond it. The only way to do that is to ask yourself painful questions...

Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking. This means that the potentially-integratable-techno-economic advantages accruing to society from the myriad specializations are not comprehended integratively and therefore are not realized, or they are realized only in negative ways, in new weaponry or the industrial support only of warfaring.

All universities have been progressively organized for ever finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever expending inventory of experiences. Children are enthusiastic planetarium audiences. Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together.

We often fail to make a distinction about two kinds of learning. The first kind of learning, which is far more common and more easily achieved, is to deepen our knowledge within an existing mental model or discipline. The second kind of learning is focused on new mental models and on shifting from one to another. It is does not deepen knowledge in a specific model but rather looks at the world outside the model and adopts or develops new models to make sense of this broader world.

People always talk about the learning curve. The hardest thing is the forgetting curve. You have to discard what you think you know. And the higher you go in management, the more difficult it is. When things are changing rapidly, you have to abandon information that is no longer useful. That takes a certain amount of courage.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Productive learning often takes place in stages. First, the learner is exposed to the core concepts, and then he or she tries to apply them and finds that he or she needs to understand them better. This makes the learner more receptive, and so the process repeats itself. Most effective courses are structured this way. Periodic tests help highlight progress and areas where more work is needed. By contrast, all too often in business, subordinates are simply instructed and left largely on their own.

If we are to learn from the experience of others, surely we have to understand their thoughts and actions in the particular situations in which they found themselves. When it comes to human action of any kind, context matters.

One of the most pervasive emotions in the workplace today is fear.The reason that there is so much fear is that everybody wants to build a learning organization, but nobody actually wants anyone to learn. Learning requires tolerating inefficiency and failure. If you genuinely want to build a learning organization, you have to accept the fact that learners are never as proficient as experts. Learning comes at a price: the experts might not get to use their expertise, and the learners might make mistakes.

One of the side effects of fear is that it absolutely retards the flow of information inside a company. So you have this anomaly: Companies pat themselves on the back as knowledge-management businesses, but because nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news, nobody inside those companies knows what is going on.

...Yet another side effect is that fear causes individuals to focus only on the short term and on their own survival.

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One way to approach lifelong learning is to think about what's threatening your job or your company. Go find out about the thing that threatens you. Understand it. You might pick the wrong company, but what you will learn will always be valuable.

The learning function must...harvest the fruits of collaboration when possible and appropriate - fruits called "innovations" - and it must help divert that collaborative energy somewhere else when it is not appropriate. This latter point is something not often discussed in the literature on innovation. That is, there is a time for innovation and a time for executing on previous innovations. You can't get anywhere in your car if your mechanic is constantly tinkering with the engine to get it to "run better."

In the knowledge economy, the real formula for success calls on the need to learn continuously. And to learn continuously, we must learn to see, and do, things differently.

We learn through conceptual frameworks, and we can continue to expand our knowledge incrementally within these existing frameworks.

But if we are to create new frameworks and see new opportunities, our evolving world calls on us to challenge the assumptions or which our traditional intellectual constructs rest.

Furthermore, it is important to understand that learning is less about absorbing information than it is about becoming part of a community.

Diversity of experience and practice, therefore, is paramount. For what better way is there to foster a different perspective than to see that perspective from another person's point of view?

Many of today's midcareer workers are well educated and have retained their love of learning. They know that increasing their skills will raise their chances for personal and professional advancement. However, many find themselves too busy for extensive education and training; personal development time comes at the sacrifice of other responsibilities, both on the job and off. And some people, especially those who have reached positions of authority, stop seeking development opportunities because they hesitate to take risks or don't want to admit that they have things to learn.

Meanwhile, too many organizations foster a silent conspiracy against education: They cut the training and development budget first in lean times. They stand silent when managers discourage employees from seeking training on the grounds that it will interfere with getting the work done. And they fail to require managers to set career development plans for all their employees. As a result, many midcareer workers are overdue for a serious infusion of training-which can include refresher courses, in-depth education to develop new skills, and brief introductions to new ideas or areas of business that expand their perspectives and trigger their interest in learning more.

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

When we have an intention to learn, we step out of the need to be right. A learning orientation motivates us to seek to understand - rather than to judge - the other person.

Fundamental academic knowledge becomes more useful in new or changing environments, when managers are faced with the unexpected or the unknown. It provides alternative frames for looking at problems rather than solutions to them.