8
Quotations
“Most people define learning too narrowly as mere “problem solving” so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Solving problems is important. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. They need to reflect critically on their own behaviour, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems and then change how they act. In particular, they must learn how the very way they go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own right.”
Chris Argyris
Harvard Business Review, May-June, 1991.
“The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of the rich men in the country”.
John Adams
"The problem with data is that it's dead. We should bring it to life by thinking through all its relationships - both with other data and with the circumstances in the world that it's supposed to represent."
Phil Agre
"Living Data", Wired Magazine,
November 1994, vol 2.11, p.94
“If the greatest database in the company is housed in the individual minds or four associates, then that is where the knowledge of the organization resides. These individual knowledge bases are constantly changing and adapting to the real world. We have to connect these knowledge bases together so that they can do whatever they do best in the shortest possible time”.
Bob Buckman
Buckman Laboratories
“The way we see it, anyone in the organization who is not directly accountable for making a profit, should be involved in creating and distributing knowledge that the company can use to make a profit.”
John Browne, former CEO of BP
Harvard Business Review, Sep-Oct 1997
“If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow”.
Rachel Carson
“The only irreplaceable capital an organization possesses is the knowledge and ability of its people. The productivity of that capital depends on how effectively people share their competence with those who can use it“.
Andrew Carnegie
“The first step towards knowledge is to know that we are ignorant”.
Richard Cecil
“These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future”.
Vernon Cooper
“Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men; Wisdom in minds attentive to their own”.
William Cowper
“Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.”
William Cowper
“It is important to remember that there is also a practice side to knowledge work, which has to be balanced with the process perspective. …..Every effort to change how work is done needs a dose of both process, the design for how work is to be done and practice, an understanding of how individual workers respond to the real world of work and accomplish their assigned tasks. ……..A process design is fundamentally an abstraction of how work should be done in the future… Practice analysis is more like anthropology - it is a well informed description of how work is done today by those actually do it.”
Tom Davenport
“Thinking for a Living” 2005.
“The basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge“.
Peter F Drucker
“More and more, the productivity of knowledge is going to become, for a country, an industry, or a company, the determining competitiveness factor. In the matter of knowledge, no one country, no one industry, no one company has a natural advantage or disadvantage. The only advantage that it can ensure to itself is to be able to draw more from the knowledge available to all than others are able to do.”
Peter F Drucker
Post Capitalist Society, 1993.
"There's no such thing as knowledge management; there are only knowledgeable people. Information only becomes knowledge in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it."
Peter F Drucker
Industry Week, 24th January 2000.
“Of central importance is the changing nature of competitive advantage – not based on market position, size and power as in times past, but on the incorporation of knowledge into all of an organization’s activities”
Leif Edvinsson
Swedish Intellectual Capital guru in Corporate Longitude (2002)
“Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification”.
Martin Fischer
“A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge and at modifying its behaviour to reflect new knowledge and insights.”
David Garvin
Harvard Business Review, July-August, 1993.
“Knowledge management is a means, not an end. The end is to increase institutional intelligence or corporate IQ……Corporate IQ is a measure of how easily your company can share information broadly and how well people within your organization can build on each other’s ideas…….Contributions to corporate IQ come from individual learning and from cross-pollination of different people’s ideas.”
Bill Gates
“Business @ The Speed of Thought” 1999.
“Power comes not from knowledge kept but from knowledge shared. A company’s values and reward systems should reflect that idea.”
Bill Gates
“Business @ The Speed of Thought” 1999.
“A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle”.
Kahlil Gibran
“When people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and skill sets engage with each other on real problems, the exchange usually generates friction, that is misunderstandings and arguments – before resolution and learning occur. Often, this friction becomes dysfunctional, misunderstanding dissolves into mistrust and opposing sides fixate on the distance between them rather than their common challenges. Yet, properly harnessed, friction can become very productive, accelerating learning, generating innovation and fostering trust across diverse participants”.
John Hagell III & John Seely Brown
“The Only Sustainable Edge”
“Learning is not finding out what other people already know, but is solving our own problems for our own purposes by questioning, thinking and testing until the solution is a new part of our life”.
Charles Handy
The Age if Unreason”, Arrow Books, 1990.
“Competitive strategy must drive knowledge management strategy. Executives must be able to articulate why customers buy a company’s products or services rather than those of its competitors. What value do customers expect from the company? How does knowledge that resides in the company add value for customers?”
Morten. T. Hansen, Nitin Nohria, Thomas Tierney
Harvard Business Review, March-April, 1999.
"In an industry with its entire foundation built upon R&D, I can’t think of anything more compelling than a solid KM strategy. It’s what will differentiate the winners from the losers in both the short-term and the long-term”.
Claire Hogikyan
“The great end of life is not knowledge but action”.
Thomas H Huxley
“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever or whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing”.
Thomas H Huxley
“We try to impress upon our employees that we are not king Solomon. We use an expression that I really like: Good managers make bad decisions. We believe that if you take an average person and put him in a management position, he’ll make 50% good decisions and 50% bad decisions. A good manager makes 60% good decisions. That means 40% of these decisions would have been better…Every Nucor plant has its little storehouse of equipment that was bought, tried and discarded.”
Ken Iverson, former chairman. Nucor
Sloan Management Review, Fall 2000
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices”.
William James
“Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it”.
Samuel Johnson
“The difference between data and knowledge is like the difference between raw food and the nourishment we obtain by eating it. An intermediate step, like information, is the meal we prepare from the raw ingredients and serve on the plate.”
Charles Jonscher
“Wired Life: Who are we in the digital Age” Anchor, 2000.
“It is and will be much more difficult to automate what we do with our minds that it was to automate what we do with our hands”.
Charles Jonscher
“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life”.
Immanual Kant
“Creating and sharing knowledge are activities that can neither be supervised nor forced out of people. They happen only when people cooperate willingly….getting that active cooperation may well turn out to be one of the key managerial issues of the next few decades”.
Chan Kim & Rence Mauborgne
Harvard Business Review, July-August 1997.
“In corporate life, even when experience is a good teacher, it’s still only a private tutor. People in organizations act collectively, but they learn individually. That is the central tenet and frustration of organizational learning today.”
Art Kleiner & George Roth, Harvard Business Review, September-October, 1997
“Relaxed in a comfortable place, one can hardly think sharply. Wisdom is squeezed out of someone who is standing on the cliff and is struggling to survive…… without such struggles, we would never have been able to catch up with IBM.”
Taiyu Kobayashi, former chairman, Fujitsu, 1985.
"KM is obsoleting what you know before others obsolete it and profit by creating the challenges and opportunities others haven't even thought about”
Dr. Yogesh Malhotra, Inc.Technology" - U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency Interoperability Directorate
"Bentov’s Law - When one acquires a bit of new information, there are many new questions that are generated by it, and each new piece of information breeds five-to-ten new questions. These questions pile up at a much faster rate than does accumulated knowledge."
Daryl Morey and Tim Frangioso
"Knowledge Management Systems"
On-line presentation: www.mitre.org, 20th July 1997
“The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows.”
Aristotle Onassis
“The store of wisdom does not consist of hard coins which keep their shape as they change from hand to hand; it consists of ideas and doctrines whose meanings change with the minds that entertain them”.
John Plamenatz
“We have transformed information into a form of garbage.”
Neil Postman
“We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us”.
Marcel Proust
“What was the means has become the ends….instead of helping us organize data, computers are drowning us in it”.
Ricardo Semler
“Human beings are designed for learning. No one has to teach an infant to work, or talk, or master the special relationships needed to stack eight building blocks that do not topple. Children come fully equipped with an insatiable drive to explore and experiment. Unfortunately, the primary institutions of our society are oriented predominantly toward controlling rather than learning, rewarding individuals for performing for others rather than for cultivating their natural curiosity and impulse to learn.”
Peter Senge, Sloan Management Review, Fall 1990.
"Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes."
Peter Senge
“Once we realize that information technology truly cannot replace human experience that is as it increases the available information, it also helps devalue the meaning of each piece of information, we will be on the road to reasserting our dominance over technology”.
David Shenk
"Unlike information, knowledge is less tangible and depends on human cognition and awareness. There are several types of knowledge - 'knowing' a fact is little different from 'information', but 'knowing' a skill, or 'knowing' that something might affect market conditions is something, that despite attempts of knowledge engineers to codify such knowledge, has an important human dimension… Measuring the knowledge asset, therefore, means putting a value on people, both as individuals and more importantly on their collective capability, and other factors such as the embedded intelligence in an organisation's computer systems."
David Skyrme
"Management Insight No. 11", I3
on-line: www.skyrme.com, 1994
“While westerners tend to emphasize explicit knowledge, the Japanese tend to stress tacit knowledge. In our view, however, tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge are not totally separate but mutually complementary entities. They interact with and inter change into each other in the creative activities of human beings.”
Hirotaka Takeuchi & Ikujiro Nonaka
“The Knowledge Creating Company”
“The Japanese approach to knowledge differs from the west in a number of ways. Knowledge is not viewed simply as data or information that can be stored in a computer in Japan, it also involves emotions, values, hunches, …companies do not merely manage knowledge but “create” it as well….everyone in the organization is involved in creating organizational knowledge, with middle managers serving as key knowledge engineers”.
Hirotaka Takeuchi & Ikujiro Nonaka
Knowledge Management
Classic & contemporary works, 2001
“Much of the excitement around knowledge management has been propelled by advances in information technology. However, information transfer is not knowledge transfer and information management is not knowledge management, although the former can certainly assist the latter. …knowledge is not primarily about facts and what we refer to as content. Rather, it is more about context……Information technology assists in the storage, retrieval and transfer of codified knowledge, but unassisted by other organizational processes, the productivity benefit from information technology is generally quite limited.”
David J Teece in “Knowledge Horizons”, 2001.
“Although we recognize knowledge as a key source of competitive advantage in business, we still have little understanding of how to create and leverage knowledge in practice. Traditional knowledge management approaches attempt to capture existing knowledge within formal systems, such as databases or websites. It may be good to capture information this way but it is only half of the task and I would argue, the second half. The first half is to foster the communities that can take the responsibility for stewarding knowledge.”