A common meme in knowledge management is that “people don’t share knowledge.” Here are a few examples:
http://www.designingforcivilsociety.org/2004/03/why_people_dont.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5362/is_200605/ai_n21391376
http://www.shrm.org/hrmagazine/articles/0504/0504covstory_share.asp
http://www.skyrme.com/updates/u64_f1.htm
The non-sharing statement is usually coupled with a set of purported justifications, and may also include a solution. However, I am not sure that the basic proposition is correct. In my experience, people are naturally willing to share what they [...]
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Posted in Lawyering, Tradition on 28 April 2008 | No Comments »
Reading Legal Week this morning, I was impressed by an article drawing on reports from a journalist embedded with the Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team. Ben Hallman, who is a reporter with The American Lawyer, spent ten days looking at how Iraq’s civil justice system is being restored.
In the middle of his account, one sentence leapt [...]
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A quick post to draw attention to Scott Berkun’s report from the Web 2.0 expo. Here’s the bit that deserves memorialisation:
The unspoken nugget / explanation / marketing line that might get me jazzed is this:
We have always been collaborative. Always been social. It’s in our genes and it’s what we have evolved to do well. [...]
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Patrick Lambe has neatly joined Dave Snowden’s challenge to the traditional MBA with a thoughtful piece by Olivier Amprimo of Headshift on the consequences of corporate specialisation. All of these are worthy of reading. For me, however, the post that brings everything into perspective makes no reference to any of these. It is Shawn Callahan’s [...]
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A story in the New York Times about Nokia’s work on human behaviour illustrates beautifully how things we create often end up being used for very different purposes.
Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, [...]
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Posted in Culture, KM, Management on 11 April 2008 | 1 Comment »
Mary Abrahams asks the critical question: “if we can’t explain succinctly what it is we do, how can we expect others in our organizations to know what we do?” Her query was triggered by an experience of being in a group of people all of whom professed to be knowledge managers but all of whom [...]
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In an Easter-flavoured post on Language Log, Geoff Pullum summarised the argument that the English language has no future tense.
The claim I’m making is not that reference to future time cannot be made in English; of course it can. And the claim is not that will cannot be thus used: probably over 80 percent of its occurrences [...]
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In my last post, I said that I wanted to refer constructively to something that Doug Cornelius wrote in his series of blog posts on Household KM. Here it is.
Doug’s posts are an interesting review of the tools available to manage domestic calendars, contacts, libraries and information. I found his take on contact management particularly insightful. As [...]
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Posted in KM, Rationality on 1 April 2008 | 2 Comments »
In an earlier post, I mentioned Joe Firestone’s insistence that we define knowledge management. The ‘defining KM’ meme is currently a hot topic. This is partly due to Joe’s article, and partly a result of Ray Sims’s listing of 43 (now 54) knowledge management definitions. When I read that list, I was disturbed by the [...]
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