One of the most frequent questions I ask businesses that have hit a stumbling block in their development is: “How do you learn?”. Some of the business owners or executives usually scratch their heads a little, at this point, before coming back to me with explanations that include mentoring initiatives, on-the-job training, performance reviews, in-house libraries and ever expanding job descriptions.

Hardly anyone, ever, cites learning from each other. Or their customers. In most businesses, it would seem, that ‘learning’ as we understand it in a business environment, still involves a controlled, top-down approach. The job dictates that you have to learn something new, perhaps. Someone from above decrees it. And you now have to hop and learn it because it’s a requirement to maintain your pay cheque.

Unfortunately this approach may tick the box called ‘learning’ but it really does nothing to help your business grow. In a market environment that has become very fluid, with customers whose target profiles and typical behavior are in flux, the strength of a business to cope needs to enlist the insights and resources of all your staff and the knowledge gained by their direct interaction with your customers.

In this Online Marketing Help podcast we look at what it means when we say that a business, in order to develop and grow, has to learn. Best-selling SEO and Social Media Marketing author, David Amerland, explains:

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