p.s. – he’s not my husband….his name is Jon Husband….

That said, I guess I would answer the question this way: Where there is trust, I share from a place of good will. Where there is no trust, I share as a way of promoting my own agenda (blowing my horn = voicing my opinion and ideas), but only to the extent that I believe it won’t damage my own goals/image/well being.

When it comes down to it, we want to create environments that allow people to grow. There has been plenty of research linking learning with improvements in workplace performance, productivity, loyalty, and happiness.

If one goes and reads a bunch of books about organizational effectiveness, or leadership, or organizational culture, that were published in the 60′s or 70′s or 80′s or 90′s, you’ll find re-phrasings of what you put in the above statement. There were less of such books published in the 60′s or 70′s, and the business / organizational section of the bookstore really started to grow fast in the 90′s.

In fact, I don’t doubt you will have read much on the topic.

If making an organizational culture more sharing-oriented, or collaborative, were simple or easy (and maybe it even is) it likely would have been done more effectively long ago. But there are obstacles .. structures, mental models, beliefs and rationalizations .. that tend to help keep things more or less the way they have been for some time now.

For example, Chris Argyris … basically, Mr. Empowerment for oh about the last 50 years or so.

Or Peter Senge (mental models) or Warren Bennis, etc., etc. A few years ago (2005) in a client’s office I picked a book off the bookshelf … Bennis on leadership in 1977 … and put it down again after about ten minutes of skimming, as I realized that it could have been written in 2005.

Now we have hyperlinks and networks, and we’re still basically talking about the same things. As Michael Schrage (then of MIT) once said, “(Hyperlinked) Networks make organizational culture and politics visible”.

But we still have and use industrial-era models for organizational structures, power and decision-making and we’re still wondering why people in workplaces don’t act as naturally as they might.

Sharing is especially tied to the mastery element of motivation, I think. Part of mastering a topic is the ability to share it. A few of the responses to “What is an expert?” were along these lines. Sharing is perhaps the best way to determine the extent of your knowledge, highlight the gaps, and stimulate a process that will fill those gaps.

this is so true, and yet, few are able to see it.

thanks.