Working Knowledge : How Organizations manage what they know

Why all this sudden interest in knowledge? Numerous conferences and hundreds of articles in scholarly and hundreds of articles in scholarly and business journals have tried to get a handle on this elusive subject. The growth of knowledge consulting and much buzzing and bustling within firms signal a growing conviction that knowing about knowledge is critical to business success - and possibly to business survival. One of the aims of this book is to explain this new emphasis on an age-old subject, one that occupied Plato and Aristotle, and a host of philosophers after their time. Like Molieres bourgeois gentil homme, who delighted in discovering that he had been speaking prose all his life, managers have recently realised that he had been speaking prose all his life, managers have recently realize that they have relied on knowledge throughout their carriers. Even before the days of "core competencies," "the learning organization," "expert systems," and "strategy focus," good managers valued the experience and know-how of employees-that is, their knowledge. Recently, though, many firms have come to understand that they require more than a casual (and even unconscious) approach to corporate knowledge if they are to succeed in today's and tomorrow's economies. This understanding accords with a renewal emphasis among strategist and economists on ideas associated with a competency-based or resource-based theory of the firm. Traditional economics looked at the firm mainly as a "black box" and examined the resources going in, the products coming out, and the markets in which the firm participated. Today, theorists of many disciplines are turning their attention to one of the essential dynamics inside the box: the knowledge embedded in routines and practices that the firm transforms into valuable products and services.