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Here are five choice articles from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms to start off your work week. I'm pointing you to articles about lifelong learning, the iPad and publishing, continuous improvement, CEO succession and compensation, and coping with complexity.

From the Economist: Never too old to learn
"“LIFELONG learning” is a phrase beloved by business schools. But not, it seems, by their clients. According to a recent survey by Mannaz, a management-development firm, the number of professionals taking part in formal corporate training drops rapidly after the age of 55. Are these wise, old heads being overlooked?"

Wally's Comment: Learning is a natural human activity. In fact, for many people, it's what makes a job or life itself interesting. When you stop learning, when curiosity evaporates, you're on the downhill slope.

From the company perspective, continuous learning is a critical part of long term competitive advantage. That means you need to make sure your training content is right for your strategy and that it's effective.

I've been training for over 30 years. I can count on one hand the number of companies in that time that had any form of rigorous evaluation of usefulness and fit of training they paid for. Check out a post from Eric Davis at i4cp titled "Learning Evaluation for Business Results." Then click over to the ASTD blog for some pointers on the process titled "Usage and value of Kirkpatrick/Phillips model."

From the Financial Post: Publishing’s saviour?
"Can the iPad save publishing? Publishers are always looking for something to save them, says Joshua Benton, founding director of Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab."

Wally's Comment: A hundred years from now, there will still be publishing, but what will it look like? And what is it about publishing that we want to save, anyway?

The current savior of choice is the iPad. But the problems and issues are different depending on whether you're talking about publishing newspapers or books.

For some background on newspapers, read "Reinventing Print Media" from Strategy + Business and "Is there hope for the newspaper industry?" from INSEAD.

For book publishing, start with the HBS article "HBS Cases: iPads, Kindles, and the Close of a Chapter in Book Publishing." You should be familiar with the informed opinions of Jason Epstein. Check out his New York Review of Books essay, "Publishing: The Revolutionary Future." Charlie Rose interviewed Epstein earlier this year . You can view the video or read the transcript.

From Industry Week: Continuous Improvement -- Process Improvement is the Key
"In our competitive world, all of your competitors can hire the same people you do, buy the same materials and, unless you build your own equipment (which could be a competitive advantage), buy the same machines. One interesting facet of this equation is that the outcomes are dependent variables. You can vary the inputs and the methods but the outcomes will be the result of these, not something that you can independently manage and control."

Wally's Comment: Continuous improvement can produce some big rewards, but it's only one of three kinds of innovation .

Process improvement may be the key, but that's not as easy as it sounds. See "Step-by-Step: There's a Process Behind Smart Process Improvement" and "Going Through the Motions: An Empirical Test of Management Involvement in Process Improvement ."

There's an important piece left out of all of this. The suggestion that process improvement is the only key ignores the importance of people Sure, as the piece says your competition can hire the same people. But (a big but) the quality of your workforce is more about how your treat and train and supervise them than it is about their "talent" coming in.

One thing Tom Hall and I found in the research for our book, Ruthless Focus is that companies with a simple, long-term strategy reap a big benefit here. Their stable workforces pick up valuable experience and generate valuable relationships. And they can spend their innovation energy on doing things better, not adapting to the latest "best" strategy.

From Strategy + Business: CEO Succession 2000-2009: A Decade of Convergence and Compression
"Convergence and compression — these are the macro themes that emerge from our analysis of 10 consecutive years’ worth of detailed data on CEO succession among the world’s top 2,500 public companies. This rich database comprises 3,719 CEO turnover events globally. Looking across the decade, it is remarkable to see how turnover rates have converged across regions since we first began tracking them in 2000. The traits of new CEO appointments — the predominance of insiders, the split of the CEO and chairman roles, the growth of the apprentice model (in which the new CEO’s predecessor assumes the job of board chairman), the consistency of industry turnover rates — all are converging around new global norms."

Wally's Comment: I see lots of articles about CEO tenure, but they're almost never as broad in coverage or as thorough as what appears in Strategy + Business. That's why the best reference point is an earlier version of this same study, "CEO Succession 2005: The Crest of the Wave ," published in 2006.

As you read this remember that a CEO can create negative change almost immediately. The best example I know is Ron Allen , who became CEO of Delta Airlines when it was easily the premier airline for business travel. By the time he left that reputation and most other good things had been shredded. Allen was so toxic that the airline industry has a bad management award named for him.

Good, positive change usually takes longer to show up and often the CEOs responsible aren't the ones who grace the covers of business magazines. Good examples are Michael Critelli, now-retired CEO of Pitney-Bowes or Lewis B. Campbell , former CEO and now non-executive chairman of Textron.

From Ivey Business Journal: Coping with Complexity
"Coping with the complexity of today’s business environment is not about predicting the future or reducing risk. It’s about building the capacity, in yourself, your people, and the organization to adapt continuously and learn speedily, in order to maximize the chances of seizing fleeting opportunities. These authors’ excellent suggestions will help today’s leaders cope with complexity."

Wally's Comment: We're in the midst of a major change in how organizations are run. For over a century, planning has been the dominant management tool. But that's changing. In this world, in this century the ability to learn and to adapt rapidly and effectively is likely to be more important. We're also moving toward strategies that are guiding principles, not detailed plans.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.