ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

19THE LEARNING CULTUREAND THE LEARNING LEADERIn this final chapter I want to shift my focus from analysis to normativeinference. There is much speculation nowadays about thedirection in which the world is heading and what all of this meansfor organizations and leadership. My sense of this is that the variouspredictions about globalism, knowledge-based organizations, theinformation age, the biotech age, the loosening of organizationalboundaries, and so on all have one theme in common—we basicallydo not know what the world of tomorrow will really be like,except that it will be different, more complex, more fast-paced, andmore culturally diverse (Hesselbein, Goldsmith, and Somerville,1999; Global Business Network, 2002; Schwartz, 2003; Michael,1985, 1991). This means that organizations and their leaders will haveto become perpetual learners.When we pose the issue of perpetual learning in the context ofcultural analysis, we confront a paradox. Culture is a stabilizer, aconservative force, a way of making things meaningful and predictable.Many management consultants and theorists have assertedthat “strong” cultures are desirable as a basis for effective andlasting performance. But strong cultures are by definition stableand hard to change. If the world is becoming more turbulent,requiring more flexibility and learning, does this not imply thatstrong cultures will increasingly become a liability? Does this notmean, then, that the process of culture creation itself is potentiallydysfunctional because it stabilizes things, whereas flexibility mightbe more appropriate? Or is it possible to imagine a culture that, byits very nature, is learning oriented, adaptive, and flexible? Can393