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When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.

...success in the marketplace today is directly proportional to the knowledge that an organization can bring to bear, how fast it can bring the knowledge to bear, and the rate at which it accumulates knowledge.

The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.

War is ninety percent information.

In the knowledge society the most probable assumption for organizations - and certainly the assumption on which they have to conduct their affairs - is that they need knowledge workers far more than knowledge workers need them.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it. But when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

The trouble with most folks ain't what they don't know. It's what they know that ain't so.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

What you know is trivial. The real issue is what do you know how to do?

Knowledge isn't power; the ability to act on knowledge is power.

Most firms grossly overinvest in technologies that let people see what's going on and dramatically underinvest in delegation and true empowerment.

Learning has to do with integrating information into your own internal framework so you own it within your own conceptual space. That means you have to engage in some kind of action with the knowledge being transferred to you.

Knowingness is murderous of wonder and of insight, and ultimately it does a violent disservice to that which it sought to serve.

The wise see knowledge and action as one.

Metaphor is the currency of knowledge. I have spent my life learning incredible amounts of disparate, disconnected, obscure, useless pieces of knowledge, and they have turned out to be, almost all of them, extremely useful.

When you know absolutely nothing about a skill, you are unconsciously incompetent -- that is, you don't know what you don't know. As you learn more, you become consciously incompetent: you know what you don't know. With training and practice you can become consciously competent, while total mastery makes you unconsciously competent, meaning that you use the skill so effortlessly that you're not even aware you're doing it.

Here's the kicker: in order to teach a skill, you have to go backward, from being unconsciously competent to being consciously competent. Until you can teach it, moreover, you don't really know what you know.

Â…knowledge has three M's: message, medium, and motivation. Message-you have to define the business-critical information in your organization. Medium-you need some sort of system to provide the right type of information to the right people at the right time. But most important, I think, is the motivation side. You have to motivate people both to populate a system and to use it. And that gets into the amorphous cultural area comprised of rewards, both monetary and non-monetary; communications, both pull and non-pull; measurement; and finally, but not least, leadership.

Intelligence becomes an asset when some useful order is created out of free flowing brain power-that is, when it is given coherent form (a mailing list, a database, an agenda for a meeting, a description of process); when it is captured in a way that allows it to be described, shared and exploited; and when it can be deployed to do something that could not be done if it remained scattered around like coins in a gutter.Â…An intellectual asset is a formally codified piece of knowledge.

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I keep six honest serving-men.
(They taught me all I knew,)
Their names are What and Why and When,
And How and Where and Who

The serious pursuit of knowledge in organizations will be challenged by an anti-intellectual orientation in the United States that has been present since the days of the frontier.

The outside figures will always remain unsatisfactory for the simple reason that the important things that happen outside the business happen at the margin, and so they are not expressed in figures until it's too late. They are qualitative changes. You can quantify them, but you don't really understand the relationship quantitatively. I've been struggling with this for 40 years, and I'm not the only one. There is basically no solid geometry to early qualitative changes that can tell you whether they are significant or not. You cannot easily convert a qualitative change into quantities.

On our global information superhighway, the last thing we need is additional lanes or more information. In fact, to accelerate effective information exchange and collaboration, we need more rest stops. We need someone to guide us in processing information. Rest stops are integral to sifting through the heaps of data to get to the golden nuggets of information that will help the bottom line grow.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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People still have anxiety about how to assimilate a body of knowledge that is expanding by the nanosecond. Misinformation and mayhem are rampant. Information anxiety is produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand.

Information anxiety is the black hole between data and knowledge. It happens when information doesn't tell us what we want to know. Our relationship to information isn't the only source of information anxiety. We are also made anxious by the fact that other people often control our access to information. We are dependent on those who design information, on the news editors and producers who decide what news we will receive, and by decision-makers in the public and private sector who can restrict the flow of information. We are also made anxious by other people's expectations of what we should know, be they company presidents, peers, or even parents.

In order to work, knowledge-management systems have to be kept live, and there have to be incentives to keep them live. In some sense, the most important source of knowledge is inside people's heads. You don't want an organization that's leakier than necessary. You don't want too many people cycling out. You need to set up team structures, so that the more experienced people teach the less experienced ones.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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Knowledge management resources go unused for one simple reason: They're not useful. Either the work isn't connected to the knowledge or the knowledge isn't connected to the work.

In the final analysis, when we fail it is not from lack of knowledge. It is, instead, from lack of wisdom to apply the things we already know. We don't fail because we don't know what to do. We fail because we don't do what we know.

Today's corporation is structured around layers of management. Most of those layers are information relays, and like any relays, they are very poor. Every transfer of information cuts the message in half. There needs to be very few layers of management in the future and those who relay the information must be very smart. But knowledge, as you know, often becomes obsolete incredibly fast.

Networks are based on trust. Because trust is determined through face-to-face interactions, one needs to appreciate the profound and stark truth about networks: 'You don't look like me, you don't dress like me, you don't think like me, therefore I don't want to know or understand you.' This fetish for the familiar is fundamentally tribal and resistant to the heterogeneous qualities of hierarchical organization. So the last, and perhaps the most important, point to make about knowledge and networks is that, contrary to popular opinion, there is a dark side to networks.

They are exclusionary groupings, based on like seeking like, and mask a fundamental fear of differences. A network is the most natural (and most ancient) form of grouping. Its cultural complement is found in hierarchies.

There is no efficiency in knowledge work -- it's the wrong target. Discretionary time is required for problem solving, innovative thinking, and fruitful collaborations.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of 18.

Ideas are a dime a dozen; anyone can have them. They can be good or bad ideas, saving your hide in some cases, wasting your time in others. The best thing about a good idea is that it forces you to act. Insight is rarer, and infinitely more precious. A strong insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand reasons to act and make something happen.