Shelly Palmer

There’s a very strong confirmation bias for all content today, regardless of whether it’s entertainment, news, or just information. It will grow even stronger as technology improves. As content distributors, we are fighting the hardest fight ever: getting through the personal filters of people who have opted into their own world view. Many have no interest in getting out of it. […] The free and … [ Read more ]

Eric Beinhocker, Nick Hanauer

Elevating the creation of shareholder value to the status of primary objective is based on a faulty assumption—that capital is the scarcest resource in an economy, when in reality it’s knowledge that’s the scarce, critical ingredient in solving problems. […] This is not to say that shareholders or other owners are unimportant. But providing them with a return that is competitive compared with the alternatives … [ Read more ]

Roger L. Martin

Even experts can be blind to important features of their subjects. I have done a lot of work on country competitiveness, but if anybody had asked me in 2000 to name the top 100 conditions that underpin a thriving economy, I wouldn’t have mentioned “a well-functioning land registry system.” Then I read [Hernando] de Soto’s compelling case that the ability to get clear title to … [ Read more ]

Maria Popova

I often think of reading not as the acquisition of static knowledge but as the active springboard for thinking and dynamic contemplation — hence the combinatorial, LEGO-like nature of creativity, wherein we assemble building blocks of existing knowledge into new formations of understanding that we consider our original ideas.

Peter Drucker

We cannot put on the computer what we cannot quantify. And we cannot quantify what we cannot define. Many of the important things, the subjective things, are in this category. To know something, to really understand something important, one must look at it from 16 different angles. People are perceptually slow, and there is no shortcut to understanding; it takes a great deal of time. … [ Read more ]

Peter Drucker

For any knowledge worker, even for the file clerk, there are two laws. The first one is that knowledge evaporates unless it’s used and augmented. Skill goes to sleep, it becomes rusty, but it can be restored and refurbished very quickly. That’s not true of knowledge. If knowledge isn’t challenged to grow, it disappears fast. It’s infinitely more perishable than any other resource we have … [ Read more ]

Peter Drucker

Information, like electricity, is energy. Just as electrical energy is energy for mechanical tasks, information is energy for mental tasks.

Peter Drucker

Psychology tells us that the one sure way to shut off all perception is to flood the senses with stimuli. That’s why the manager with reams of computer output on his desk is hopelessly uninformed. That’s why it’s so important to exploit the computer’s ability to give us only the information we want—nothing else. The question we must ask is not, “How many figures can … [ Read more ]

Giampaolo Garzarelli

We live in uncertain environments. Uncertainty derives in good measure from the limited cognition (dispersed and specific capabilities) of different economic actors. Consequently, knowledge differences lead to division of labor and to specialization throughout the economy. A firm is that entrepreneurial organ that utilizes such division of labor and specialization to achieve some more or less well-defined ends. As such, it is akin to a … [ Read more ]

Freek Vermeulen

When something seems too good to be true, it usually is. And management techniques, practices, and strategies are no different. When you read a business book or attend a presentation on a particular management practice, it is a good habit to explicitly ask, “What might it not be good for?” When might it not work; what could be its drawbacks?

[…] There is a second … [ Read more ]

David Starr Jordan

Wisdom is knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it.

Aristotle

Teaching is the highest form of understanding.

Daniel J. Boorstin

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance–it is the illusion of knowledge.

Will Rogers

It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you know that ain’t so.

Jim Rohn

Finding is reserved for the searchers. We don’t find what we need; we find what we search for. Needing is not a prerequisite to getting value. You can’t be a needer, you have to be a searcher.

Gunnar Hedlund

The current, and justified, fascination with the tacit component of knowledge […] must not cloud the fact that organizations to a large extent are ‘articulation machines,’ built around codified practices and deriving some of their competitive advantages from clever, unique articulation.

Arnold Brown

The Net is creating a demand for navigators—individuals (or computer programs) who can take people and businesses with their own information-overflow problems by the hand to help them find their way through a thicket of information.

Qamar Rizvi

Knowledge is a higher order of awareness that tells you why. Know-how is a higher order of knowledge that tells you how.

Yves Doz

I think that most so-called knowledge management systems act like the Yellow Pages. They have been good at essentially two things: locating sources of knowledge internally, and tagging and cataloging existing knowledge in the company. But they haven’t been designed that well for prospecting and accessing knowledge outside the company. Most are fairly inward-looking, which is good for some consulting companies that have a lot … [ Read more ]

Yves Doz

Easily codified knowledge, the kind that knowledge systems manage pretty well, is probably the least deeply interesting knowledge, because it is not likely to provide very sustainable competitive differentiation. Learning by doing indeed leads to original operating knowledge, of a very valuable, hard-to-imitate type.