…thinking aloud about knowledge and legal services
My friend Mary Abraham has written a characteristically perceptive post about the lessons innovators should learn from the pyramid builders. It is both interesting and useful. Mary’s lessons can be summarised thus: Innovate by using a series of disciplined experiments that are thoughtfully designed and carefully executed. An experiment that is not examined for lessons learned… Continue reading Innovation: the importance of ‘why’
Spurred on by a disappointing conference experience, Greg Lambert has challenged law firm KMers to justify their existence. He starts: I have to tell you that coming away from the ARK conference on Knowledge Management, I was a little disappointed with the direction that many of the law firms are taking with the idea of… Continue reading KM in law firms: rising to a challenge
Over the summer, I read a couple of blog posts about knowledge storage that I marked to come back and comment on. Separately, Mary Abraham and Greg Lambert have suggested a fairly traditional approach to selection of key knowledge for storage and later access. First, Greg issued a clarion call for selectivity in information storage: Knowledge… Continue reading Storing our future knowledge?
This has been a Summer of story for me. Back in June, I attended a workshop run by Shawn Callahan on “Storytelling for Business Leaders”. I was vaguely aware (from reading Shawn’s blog if nothing else) of the power of narrative, but he drew out the key elements really well. Now I realise that a… Continue reading Book review: Made to Stick
This isn’t a political blog, and it is a coincidence that I came across a couple of things that chime with each other on the same day that the UK government has started to reverse from its enthusiastic promotion of ID cards for all. The first juicy nugget came from Anne Marie McEwan. In writing… Continue reading It’s mine and I will choose what to do with it
A discussion is currently taking place on the ActKM mailing list about the theoretical underpinnings of knowledge management. Joe Firestone, reaching into the language of philosophy, has consistently taken the view that KM only makes sense when related to the need to improve underlying knowledge processes: I see [knowledge management] more as a field defined… Continue reading The conundrum focus
For too long, I have had Theodore Zeldin’s little book, Conversation, on my wish-list. Prompted by a colleague’s comment I finally tracked a copy down. (It is out of print, but extremely easy to find on Amazon or Abebooks.) I wish I had done so sooner. The word ‘conversation’ is scattered throughout this blog. Like… Continue reading What do we talk about when we talk about work?
Yet again, Mary Abraham has hit the target. In a blog post earlier in the week, “Off-Route, Recalculate”, she uses satellite navigation as a metaphor for planning KM activities. As we plan and carry out our knowledge management efforts, it can be difficult to identify the correct route. And, it can be unpleasant to be… Continue reading Direction-finding
If nothing else, the state of the economy must make us wonder what things are going to be like when it is all over. At a personal level, there are people whose careers have been forced in a direction they neither expected or wanted. Some household names (such as Woolworths in the UK) have already… Continue reading Knowing how to be disruptive
It is an old English tradition that Christmas Day, as one of the quarter days, is a day for settling accounts. Over the past eleven months I have unexpectedly and gratifyingly incurred a number of debts. The most significant is owed to Mary Abraham, who posed a question to a few of us back in… Continue reading Settling accounts
Mark Gould... 