Leading Organizational Learning

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Developing a Learning Culture

on Wall Street

One Firm’s Experience

Steffen Landauer

Steve Kerr

Among the most basic tenets of organizational theory is that to be
successful, organizations must be able to both differentiate and
integrate. Usually omitted from this proposition is that the two
endeavors are not equally difficult. Differentiation often comes eas-
ily, sometimes with no effort whatsoever, whereas integration
almost never does. Most organizations spend a great deal of time,
with no assurance of success, trying to get their different functions,
regions, and hierarchical levels to be civil to one another, let alone
to welcome and adopt anyone else’s good ideas and best practices.
A number of forces share responsibility for this state of affairs, from
the difficulty many people experience in “telling truth to power” to
the psychological barriers to knowledge transmission that have
come to be known as the NIH (“not invented here”) syndrome.
In addition to the universal impediments to the free trade of
ideas within firms, and between firms and their external con-
stituencies, several characteristics common to financial service
firms further inhibit the exchange and assimilation of new infor-
mation. First, many financial service firms have been successful
without exchanging best practices from within or admitting new
ideas from outside. Traditionally, firms in the industry have

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