Curtis Conley discusses individualist vs communitarian approaches to KM. This kind of cross-cultural analysis is based on the work of Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars & Charles Hampden-Turner. The more I am exposed to these tools, the more they remind me of MBTI and HBD approaches in personality typing - a useful place to start but a terrible place to finish.
Basically your behaviour is rated using a survey instrument. I remember taking a survey based on Hofstede's work and coming out looking pretty English. The cross-cultural stuff then underlies a lot corporate training in multinationals where as the personality stuff is often used in the service of teambuilding. If facilitated with a lightness of touch and a respect for people's experiences this can lead to a useful discussion on difference and diversity.
The problem occurs when you take this stuff too seriously. At the personality level, knowing my MBTI score will not allow you to predict my future behaviour. At the cross-cultural level, a lot of diversity training tends to get mired in stereotypes: we English don't express ourselves, Americans are loud, Japanese people are submissive. Now most stereotypes have an element of truth in them but they do not have predictive power. There are quiet Americans and loud Japanese people.
I think we are still at the stage where the acknowledgement of difference has use but I suspect these tools will lose whatever power they have over time. I hope we will outgrow them.
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The false dichotomy or range of results found in personality tests remind me a lot of horoscopes. No matter what the result is, it's always vague enough that it seems at least somewhat applicable. So in the case of the CKO summit that found this issue arising as a result of globalization, I think it's worth looking in to - but with the caveat that any discussion needs to be rid of those false dichotomies and blanket generalizations. Like you say – that's a worthless place to end up.
For instance, when looking at some of my dissertation results – it isn't that participants from North America and Asia identified CSFs for KM in different order, they really didn't. But respondents from North America rated the CSFs higher, which was interesting. No idea if it actually means anything, but it's worth asking the question. Now, if I end up selling an organizational KM culture assessment tool based on this question you'll know I've become a sellout...
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