Leading Organizational Learning

Chapter Two

Five Dilemmas of Knowledge

Management

Fons Trompenaars

Charles Hampden-Turner

Over the past decade, knowledge management has gained an
important place in management thinking and it is a crucial process
within the learning organization. Obviously, the development from
an industrial to a knowledge economy has been the major rationale
for its popularity. Yet similar to the latest management fads around
management by objectives and teamwork, it is also a reaction to
the absence of certain values in our Western society.
To process knowledge effectively has perhaps become today’s
most important competitive advantage. It determines innovative
competence—the way you can apply and retain the core compe-
tencies within an organization—and the way the organization
learns. Effective knowledge management is dependent on the type
of organizational culture in which it reconciles dilemmas. I have
identified five types of dilemmas:

1. Universal versus particular knowledge


2. Individual versus team knowledge


3. Specific and codified versus diffuse and implicit
   knowledge


4. Top-down versus bottom-up knowledge


5. Inside-out to outside-in knowledge

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