A recent newspaper article referred to a Harvard Business School, "Management Updates" newsletter that talked about learning styles and active versus passive learners. According the information in the newsletter, only 10% of today's organizational population are active learners. We can expect the new workplace to demand and be increasingly dependent on active learners. Whether passive learning is a condition of our upbringing, our educational patterns, our organizational pressures, or our genetics is unknown. Whatever the case, we can expect increasing tension to build.

From the individual perspective, this may mean a decreasing number of jobs where passive learners can get by. Just as there are many fewer jobs today than in the past for people without a high school (and now college) education, we may see the same displacement of passive learners begin to occur. From the organizational perspective we will see pressure to meet some needs by structuring roles to accommodate passive learners, simply because there are not enough active learners to go around. This is another reason middle managers will not disappear entirely. One of the functions of a middle manager is to focus energy and knowledge to help passive learners be successful in their jobs. However, the pressure will be there to minimize this type of overhead in organizations, and the degree to which it is tolerated will be dependent on how successful we are at creating a higher percentage of active learners.