Dear Bob ...I don’t agree with your point below: “…Exceptional performance? That means repeating the results of others, not having them repeat yours,” (from "Creating a learning organization," Keep the Joint Running, 11/26/2007).Many of us are faced with the challenge of global standardization. We are focused on the harmonization of disparate legacy regional processes. Leading other teams to repeat our repeated Dear Bob …I don’t agree with your point below: “…Exceptional performance? That means repeating the results of others, not having them repeat yours,” (from “Creating a learning organization,” Keep the Joint Running, 11/26/2007). Many of us are faced with the challenge of global standardization. We are focused on the harmonization of disparate legacy regional processes. Leading other teams to repeat our repeated successful results is the measure of exceptional performance.Perhaps I didn’t understand your point …– In the lead Dear Leader …My point was simple: If you want to encourage the broader use of anyone’s success, you have to make it clear that making use of someone else’s ideas is the engine that makes this happen much more than creating re-usable something-or-others. Otherwise, instead of (for example) using the existing Pricing service that another developer wrote, a developer will be more likely to develop a new one, for all the standard reasons.You might think you can lead other teams to make use of your repeated successes. If they are paid more to create their own instead, the outcome is entirely predictable. Put it differently, and more broadly: You aren’t leading unless they’re following. Voluntarily because they want to, not because you’re dragging them.It takes a lot to create that sort of environment – much more than building the reusable somethings. Supply side economics doesn’t work here. You also have to create the demand.I’ll add one more point I didn’t make in the KJR column: Reusing the processes and components created by others is, in many respects, more difficult than building them in the first place. Software is an opinion about how to automate part or all of a business process or practice. Business process designs are opinions about how a particular business function should run.Those who build these things the first time have the privilege of their opinions defining things. Those who have to adopt them do not, and wherever they disagree, they have to subordinate their disagreement … their good judgment about how things ought to be … to the greater good of re-usability.When you re-use the work of others, you’re forced to accept a different view of the world than your own. That can be a whole lot harder than turning the view you have into software and swim-lane diagrams. – BobPowered by ScribeFire. Technology Industry