Keep learning, or risk becoming irrelevant.

It's a truism in today's economy: the only constant is change. Technological automation is making jobs less routine and more cognitively challenging. Globalization means you're competing with workers around the world. Simultaneously, the internet and other communication technologies have radically increased the potential impact of individual knowledge.The relentless dynamism of these forces shaping our lives has created a new imperative: we must strive to become dynamic learners. In every industry and sector, dynamic learners outperform their peers and realize higher impact and fulfillment by learning continuously and by leveraging that learning to build yet more knowledge.

In Never Stop Learning, behavioral scientist and operations expert Bradley R. Staats describes the principles and practices that comprise dynamic learning and outlines a framework to help you become more effective as a lifelong learner. The steps include:

• Valuing failure
• Focusing on process, not outcome, and on questions, not answers
• Making time for reflection
• Learning to be true to yourself by playing to your strengths
• Pairing specialization with variety
• Treating others as learning partners

Replete with the most recent research about how we learn as well as engaging stories that show how real learning happens, Never Stop Learning will become the operating manual for leaders, managers, and anyone who wants to keep thriving in the new world of work.

Bradley R. Staats is an associate professor of operations at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. His work has been featured in many publications, including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, the New Yorker, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, as well as on NPR.

Brad Staats examines how individuals and organizations learn and improve in order to stay relevant, innovate and succeed on an ongoing basis. His teaching focuses on learning and analytics. He also works with companies around the world on their learning and analytics strategies.

Dr. Staats integrates work in operations management and human behavior to understand how and under what conditions individuals, teams and organizations can perform their best. His field-based research in such settings as healthcare and software services, consulting, call centers and retail, uses archival data and field experiments to provide an interdisciplinary perspective to improve both operations’ theory and practice.

He is the author of the award-winning book “Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself and Thrive” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). He shares original research, outlines why success demands continuous learning and provides a practical framework for becoming a dynamic learner.

Dr. Staats leads the Center for the Business of Health, a cross-disciplinary initiative targeting some of the biggest healthcare challenges of our time. UNC Kenan-Flagler is leading efforts to grow this initiative, which is by design a pan-university effort that draws upon the wide health sciences strengths across campus, including our top-ranked schools of pharmacy, public health, nursing, dentistry, arts and sciences, medicine and business. By building on this collaborative powerhouse of resources and talent through the Center for the Business of Health, UNC Kenan-Flagler seeks to distinguish both itself and the University as leading national voices in education, research and thought leadership in the business of healthcare.

He received the 2016 Warren Bennis Prize for his article “Why Organizations Don’t Learn” in Harvard Business Review. The award honors the previous year’s best article on leadership. He publishes frequently in  leading academic journals and practitioner-focused journals. He is an associate editor at Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and Production and Operations Management.

He received his DBA in technology and operations management and MBA from Harvard Business School, and his BS with honors in electrical engineering and BA with high honors in Plan II and Spanish from The University of Texas at Austin.

Source: University of North Carolina