651 Posts Found

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann once said to me that he thought the most valued personal trait in the twenty-first century would be a facility for synthesizing information. Increasingly, I am convinced he was correct. The ability to decide what information to heed, what to ignore, and how to organize and communicate that which we judge to be important is becoming a core competence … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Information, Knowledge

First-line managers should operate the company. Directors should coach the managers and spend an equal amount of time working with their counterpart directors in other functional areas to ensure that each piece of the business is productive and profitable. Vice presidents should coach the directors and spend the majority of their time defining and developing the company as it will need to be in three … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Management, Observations

Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance and most claims of magic are testimony to hubris.

Content: Quotation | Sources: Evidence-Based Management, Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Knowledge

At least since Plato’s time, people have appreciated that true wisdom does not come from the sheer accumulation of knowledge, but from a healthy respect for and curiosity about the vast realms of knowledge still unconquered. Evidence-based management is conducted best not by know-it-alls but by managers who profoundly appreciate how much they do not know. These managers aren’t frozen into inaction by ignorance; rather, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Sources: Evidence-Based Management, Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Knowledge, Management

In the knowledge economy, the real formula for success calls on the need to learn continuously. And to learn continuously, we must learn to see, and do, things differently.

We learn through conceptual frameworks, and we can continue to expand our knowledge incrementally within these existing frameworks.

But if we are to create new frameworks and see new opportunities, our evolving world calls on us to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Storytelling: Passport to Success in the 21st Century | Subjects: Knowledge, Learning

A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude.

Content: Quotation | Source: Storytelling: Passport to Success in the 21st Century | Subjects: Communication, Persuasion

Some knowledge is best treated as discrete. Knowledge that is well codified and will readily diffuse is often best served by hoarding strategies. Other types of knowledge may best be treated as residing in densely connected networks. Some of it may be well codified and abstract, some may take a narrative form, but much of it will remain embodied and won’t readily diffuse. It may … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subject: Knowledge

A preoccupation with protecting and hoarding knowledge may actually prevent a company from creating new knowledge. Protection and creation are incompatible urges. The company that spends most of its energy hoarding and protecting its knowledge will have less energy for generating new knowledge and innovations in all aspects of its business. Innovative companies are generally those that do not rest on their intellectual laurels, but … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subjects: Innovation, Knowledge

As adults, when we try to solve a problem, we often ask, “What does this mean?” We try to pull the answer from our knowledge bank, just like finding the solution in an encyclopedia. Solve the problem the way it has been solved in the past. This can be useful, but it provides a limited set of possibilities. This is about replication and regurgitation. An … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: 24/7 Innovation | Subjects: Innovation, Thought

When you look at the productivity vs. activity scale, most of the things on your desk, in your files, and in your mail are activity, not productivity. As a blind person, I am fortunate enough to have people who take volumes of printed material and reduce them to the items that I have determined to be productive. If you can do this in your work … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: CEO Refresher | Subjects: Information, Productivity / Work Tips

Strategy and structure are fundamentally about attention. After all, in the world of everyday decision-making, what are strategy and structure? Both strategy and structure are mental constructs, important not in themselves, but for their impact on the people in the organization. There is no absolute reality of a firm’s strategy or its structure, or at least not one that we can all agree on. Rather, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Attention, Organizational Behavior

Organizational structure is the plan for, and the reality of, how power and responsibility are distributed across an organization. We humans are social animals. So, inside our groups, we focus on hierarchy; outside, we focus on the identifiable groups or individuals who represent opportunity or threat. Thus, organizational structure is a powerful vehicle for focusing employees’ and external stakeholders’ attention on a particular aspect of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Attention, Organizational Behavior

Because design solutions are always matters of invented choice, rather than discovered truth, the judgment of designers is always open to question by the broader public.

…this notion of the inevitable need to justify to others the ‘rightness’ of the design choices made – is perhaps the most significant implication for the design of strategy processes in business organizations. Because strategic choices can never be … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Design, Strategy

Because knowledge generation is guided by the same basic philosophy that guides the development of expertise, there is littler opportunity to escape its straitjacket: if we wield the logic of specialization and simplification, every phenomenon looks simple and easily decomposable.

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Expertise, Knowledge

One of the most pervasive emotions in the workplace today is fear.The reason that there is so much fear is that everybody wants to build a learning organization, but nobody actually wants anyone to learn. Learning requires tolerating inefficiency and failure. If you genuinely want to build a learning organization, you have to accept the fact that learners are never as proficient as experts. Learning … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Fear / Doubt, Learning

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Content: Quotation | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subjects: Attention, Information

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

Content: Quotation | Sources: The Left Hand of Darkness (Remembering Tomorrow), The Virtual Handshake | Subjects: Action, Information

The orator persuades by moral character when his speech is delivered in such a manner as to render him worthy of confidence; for we trust such persons to a greater degree, and more readily. This is generally true for all types of arguments, and absolutely true when there is uncertainty and room for doubt.

Content: Quotation | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Communication, Persuasion

The glue that holds all relationships together — including the relationship between the leader and the led is trust, and trust is based on integrity.

Content: Quotation | Source: Zaadz | Subjects: Integrity, Trust

Action without intelligence is a form of insanity, but intelligence without action is the greatest form of stupidity in the world.

Content: Quotation | Source: Unknown | Subjects: Action, Intelligence