Unfortunately, progress in making information available has far
outstripped advances in making information useful. This is espe-
cially true with respect to knowledge about leadership and man-
agement. Storage has become so cheap that companies have
compiled ever more encyclopedic databases. Braggadocio among
learning organizations too often concerns who has the greatest
number of items, vendors, and gigabytes, rather than the extent to
which the information is actually used to benefit the business.
More is not necessarily better; managers are already suffering from
information overload.
Our contention is that information technology has an
important role to play in leadership and management develop-
ment. To achieve its full promise, however, the way in which infor-
mation is organized and made available must be rethought. In this
chapter, we explore the need and opportunity to use information
technology and the Internet to support leadership development
more effectively, using illustrations from our own work and that of
others.
The ChallengeWhile there is little doubt that ignorance of management and lead-
ership principles is an impediment to greater effectiveness, the con-
verse is not necessarily true. That is, knowledge of principles and
methods does not necessarily lead to their application. As Jeffrey
Pfeffer and Robert Sutton explain in their book The Knowing-Doing
Gap,“Regardless of the quality of content, the delivery, or the fre-
quency of repetition, management education is often ineffective in
changing organizational practices.... We came to call this the
knowing-doing problem—the challenge of turning knowledge...
into actions consistent with that knowledge.”^1
The challenge, then, is not merely making knowledge avail-
able but doing so in a way that encourages and ensures its appli-
cation.
122 LEADINGORGANIZATIONALLEARNING