110 Posts Found

I think the knowledge-driven economy is an unfortunate phrase because I tell you, making cars or making forklift trucks, or other high positioned equipment, needs, in my experience, more knowledge and more skills than running service sector companies and e-commerce dot com companies. Knowledge economy talk is quite an insult to my plumber and my car mechanic and the farmers and people who do other … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Bischof | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subjects: Economics, Knowledge

The challenge for me was to have informal contacts and to get information from outside the organization that had been set up to provide me information. I did that beginning at 6:30 every morning, when I’d hit my office having read all the newspapers. I would get the CIA to come in for 20 minutes with no other staff members present and tell me what … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Colin Powell | Source: Context Magazine | Subjects: Competitive Intelligence, Decision Making, Knowledge, Leadership

It’s easy to convince yourself you know something until you have to explain it to someone else. Then the truth comes out.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jason Fried | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Communication, Education, Knowledge, Learning

Data is heavy. It wants to go down, not up, in an organization. In other words, most employees, just by the nature of their responsibilities, don’t want to provide data to their bosses. When there’s a problem, they want to solve it and tell the people above them that they solved it. Information about problems thus sinks to the bottom, out of the eyesight and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Clayton M. Christensen | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Information, Knowledge, Management, Organizational Behavior

Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month’s efforts could be produced on call. Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Vannevar Bush | Subjects: Education, Information, Knowledge, Learning

The most important skill for the next generation of knowledge worker is not learning what to do but rather determining what not to do, and instead focusing on key objectives. It’s only as we embrace the incredible volume of noise in our work and our lives that we can silence it—or at least reduce it to a dull roar. Ignore the noise. Conquer the critical. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Rory Vaden | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Career, Knowledge, Personal Development, Skills

Knowing what we know is less powerful than knowing who knows what.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sigvald Harryson | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Knowledge

A healthy knowledge ecology needs two types of contributors, characterized metaphorically as the serious scientist (analytical, focused, consistent) and the hungry artist (playful, transcending boundaries, unpredictable). How we bring together different cognitive styles largely determines the success of our strategic capabilities. The key is to insist that both types be equally grounded in the mission of the organization. With shared understanding of purpose we can … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: John Seely Brown | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Innovation, Knowledge

The gulf between the question you want to ask and the question you can answer is often unbridgeable.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Knowledge

We shouldn’t take the view that we need a single narrative that unifies our experiences. Rather, we should carry multiple narratives simultaneously, continuously updating our estimates of the contours of each and our assessments of which is most likely to be right as new data points become available. Need to understand why your company is successful? Entertain the possibility that you’ve just been lucky, as … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Knowledge, Wisdom

At the heart of KM has always lurked a subversive notion: If knowledge is a company’s most important asset, and if the people who work for it collectively possess a deeper knowledge of how the company works, then the people employed by it should be better placed to run it than the executives. Harnessing collective wisdom only needs some means to manage collectively.

Content: Quotation | Author: James Krohe Jr. | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Knowledge

Managing knowledge is hard to do well because managing knowledge is hard to do at all. Knowledge is at once a process, an outcome, and a raw material. Managing knowledge thus cuts across all the familiar institutional boundaries, which is why some firms base their KM efforts in their IT departments, some in HR, some in “business strategy” departments, some in new departments set up … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James Krohe Jr. | Source: The Conference Board | Subject: Knowledge

With on-demand access to managed knowledge, every situation is addressed with the sum total of everything anyone in the organization has ever learned about a situation of a similar nature. The problem is that the sum total of everything anyone learned about anything is usually a muddle. If you doubt it, Google “management.”

Content: Quotation | Authors: Gene Bellinger, James Krohe Jr. | Source: The Conference Board | Subject: Knowledge

a repository is no better than the questions asked of it, and people tend to seek only information that they perceive is relevant to them, because their notions of relevance are limited by their lack of information—the so-called relevance paradox. This doesn’t matter much, however, if people don’t ask questions in the first place. Left to themselves, people prefer to exploit the unofficial KM systems … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James Krohe Jr. | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Knowledge, Organizational Behavior

Before the Industrial Revolution, individuals owned the processes, tools, and procedures, and suddenly they were taken over by the corporation. That went on for 150 or 200 years, and as we shifted into the knowledge- and service-work economy, we put more and more back on the shoulders of the individual worker. The corporate infrastructure has not kept up with the changes in the design of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Bill Jensen | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Economics, Knowledge, Organizational Behavior

Managing for effectiveness in what economists call tacit interactions—the searching, coordinating, and monitoring activities required to exchange goods, services, and information—is about fostering change, learning, collaboration, shared values, and innovation. Workers engage in a larger number of higher-quality tacit interactions when organizational barriers (such as hierarchies and silos) don’t get in the way, when people trust each other and have the confidence to organize themselves, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Bradford C. Johnson, James Manyika, Scott C. Beardsley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Knowledge, Management, Organizational Behavior

The problems of free access are fairly obvious: while workers may know how to use technology tools, they may not be skilled at searching for, using, or sharing the knowledge. One survey revealed that over a quarter of a typical knowledge worker’s time is spent searching for information. Another found that only 16 percent of the content within typical businesses is posted to locations where … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Thomas H. Davenport | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Knowledge, Productivity / Work Tips

What makes knowledge workers is not what they know but how well they are able to use what they know.

Content: Quotation | Author: James Krohe Jr. | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Knowledge

Ignorance is the most important component for helping others to solve any problem in any industry. Ignorance is not such a bad thing if one knows how to use it, and all managers must learn how to do this. You must frequently approach problems with your ignorance; not what you think you know from past experience, because not infrequently, what you think you know is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: American Marketing Association (AMA) | Subject: Knowledge

We human beings are not prepared at all for the explosion of new practices the Internet will produce. Education is going to be in networks and it will not be about knowledge. It will be about being successful in relationships, about how to make offers, how to build trust, how to cultivate prudence and emotional resilience.

Content: Quotation | Author: Fernando Flores | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Education, Knowledge