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Archive for the ‘Rationality’ Category

Prescriptivity and appropriateness

Posted in Knowledge, Language, Lawyering, Learning, Rationality, Tradition on 30 September 2008 | 2 Comments »

One of the links in my blogroll is to Language Log, which is home to some of the most rigorous blogging on the internet. As its name indicates, it deals with language and linguistics, but in the broadest possible sense. So its authors have taken on sex differences and biological determinism, science journalism, lolcats, and [...]

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Motivation

Posted in KM, Rationality on 25 July 2008 | No Comments »

Here’s an odd press release:
De-motivated UK workers feel the heat of ’summer sad’
Over half (58 per cent) of UK workers suffer from ‘Summer Seasonal Affective Disorder’ which leaves many de-motivated, unhappy and even close to quitting their jobs, according to a poll released today by the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA).
According to this [...]

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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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Defining KM

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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Recognition and understanding

Posted in Irrationality, Rationality, Science, Tradition on 18 March 2008 | 2 Comments »

It is important to us that people listen to our needs, understand them and adapt to them. We know this about ourselves, but very few of us can naturally empathise with others. One reason for this, I think, is that human beings are almost infinitely complex and yet our brains cannot cope with this variety.
So [...]

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Critical thinking about KM

Posted in Culture, KM, Rationality, Technology on 12 March 2008 | 2 Comments »

Three thought-provoking KM-related articles have recently come to my attention, so I thought it might be useful to bring them together. Two of them embody a critical approach to the discipline, whilst the third is more mainstream (but can be read in a different way).
Those who participate in the actKM mailing list will know that Joe [...]

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Nobody expects…

Posted in Irrationality, Rationality on 3 March 2008 | No Comments »

There is an interesting article in the NY Times last week: The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors, which looks at the work of Dan Ariely on decision-making. Ariely has just published a book, Predictably Irrational, and he has a website with the same name. The NYT article focuses on a particular aspect of his [...]

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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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