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Archive for the ‘Management’ Category

Measuring maturity

Posted in Irrationality, KM, Knowledge, Learning, Management on 14 October 2008 | 1 Comment »

There is a small number of meta-questions about knowledge management that people regularly grapple with. The most obvious is “what is knowledge management?” After that, the next most frequently asked must be “how do you measure KM success?” I have found at least 23 answers (or challenges) to that question, and there are undoubtedly more. [...]

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You can’t make me do it…

Posted in Culture, KM, Management on 3 October 2008 | No Comments »

In an earlier post, I wrote briefly about incentives in KM initiatives. In what looks like a response to Dave Snowden’s assertion that story-telling can be manipulative (”I think story telling is the weakest, least effective and most dangerous form of narrative work”), Shawn Callahan points to a summary by David Maxfield of the distinction between [...]

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Dilemmas

Posted in Collaboration, Innovation, Management, Rationality on 9 July 2008 | No Comments »

Reading Tom Davenport’s brief polemic on the meaning of management (and the comments on it), I have realised that some of the things that I believe (and have promoted here) may be mutually contradictory.
Commenting on IBM’s explicit change in terminology from “knowledge management” to “knowledge sharing”, Davenport argues that (a) the equation of “management” with [...]

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Lowering the sharing threshold

Posted in Culture, KM, Management, Sharing, Technology, Web2.0 on 28 April 2008 | 2 Comments »

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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Who am I?

Posted in Culture, KM, Learning, Management, Tradition on 21 April 2008 | No Comments »

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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Express, or all floors?

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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Can’t Buy Me Culture

Posted in Culture, KM, Lawyering, Management, Technology on 14 February 2008 | 2 Comments »

According to Jordan Furlong, “Money Talks“. He describes the adoption of a wiki by a North Carolina law firm, which is rewarding contributions by its staff with the incentive of a $1000 prize for the best contribution. Jordan reasons thus:
Law firms ask a lot of their employees, mostly with regard to cramming a whole lot [...]

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Projects, choice and satisfaction

Posted in Irrationality, Management, Projects, Rationality on 6 February 2008 | 1 Comment »

Patrick Lambe points to an article in the Des Moines Register reporting on research done at the University of Iowa.
The team’s paper, “The Blissful Ignorance Effect,” shows that people who have only a little information about a product are happier with their purchases than people who have more information, the U of I reported. The [...]

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