ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

THE LEARNING CULTURE AND THE LEARNING LEADER 4132. Leaders must be able to decipher the other culture; to engagein the kinds of activities that will reveal to them and to theother organization what some of its assumptions are.3. Leaders must be able to articulate the potential synergies orincompatibilities in such a way that others involved in thedecision process can understand and deal with the culturalrealities.4. If the leader is not the CEO, he or she must be able to convincethe CEO or the executive team to take the culturalissues seriously.Members of planning groups or acquisition teams often developthe cross-cultural insights necessary to make good decisions aboutmergers and acquisitions, but lack the skills to convince their ownsenior managers to take the culture issues seriously. Or, alternatively,they get caught up in political processes that prevent the culturalrealities from being attended to until after the key decisionshave been made. In any case, cultural diagnosis based on marginalityand the ability to surmount one’s own culture again surfaces asthe critical characteristic of learning leaders.Leadership and Culture in Partnerships,Joint Ventures, and Strategic AlliancesJoint ventures and strategic alliances require cultural analysis evenmore than mergers and acquisitions, because in today’s rapidly globalizingworld, cross-national boundaries are increasingly involved.Deciphering differences between two companies in the same nationalculture is not as difficult as deciphering both national andcompany differences when one engages in a partnership or jointventure across national boundaries (Salk, 1997). One of the specialdifficulties is determining whether the differences that are perceivedare attributable to national or organizational cultures, yet it is importantto make this determination because one must assume thatthe likelihood of changing national characteristics is very low.