Capsulas De Ackoff

Book Description

Designed as a true teaching text complete with pedagogical features to support learning, this book will provide a rigorous yet accessible approach to the new area of knowledge management. Based on empirical research rather than anecdotal evidence, the text is written specifically for a student audience rather than an academic one.

Customer Reviews:

A good intro for early stage KM professionals.......2003-01-23

This book is useful for early-stage KM professionals and MBA students looking for an introduction to the importance of knowledge in today's workplace and strategies for managing knowledge-intensive workplaces.

The material is divided into eight chapters including hypothetical scenarios as well as real-life case studies like Buckman Labs, Microsoft, Xerox, and Midlands Hospital....

Sue Newell is professor of innovation and organisational analysis at the University of London; the other co-authors are at the University of Warwick.

The introduction chapter reviews the organisational knowledge-related contributions of Peter Drucker, Daniel Bell, Manuel Castells, Zuboff, Polanyi, Nonaka (tacit/explicit knowledge), Spender (conscious/automatic/objectified/collective knowledge), Blackler (embrained (cognitive), embodied (action-oriented), encultured (in organisations), embedded (in routines) and encoded (symbolic) knowledge), Tom Stewart (financial capital, customer capital, structural capital, human capital, social capital), and Frederick Windslow Taylor (principles of Scientific Management formulated in 1991, still used today in sectors like call centres and fast food outlets).

"For knowledge workers, knowledge is simultaneously an input, medium and output for their work," according to the authors, who view modern firms more as "orchestras."

"ICT systems are increasingly widespread as enabling technologies for the processing of knowledge; furnishing knowledge inputs in the form of software systems; providing the medium for knowledge work through the development of email, groupware and Intranet technologies; and becoming the means for capturing the output of knowledge work in the shape of ICT-based artefacts and presentations," the authors observe.

ICTs are simultaneously social and physical artefacts. ICTs play an important role in the globalisation of business, interorganisational networking, and cross-functional project teams.

Structuring of KM architecture should allow for the complex nature of knowledge, which can often be uncertain, difficult to capture, dynamically changing, highly context dependent, expensive to codify, and too politically sensitive to make explicit.

Highly knowledge intensive sectors even have "gold collar" workers who have a high degree of autonomy and occasional co-location requirements with clients. But conflicts can arise between professional and organisational values, between employees who may want to do the best job but organisations which may place more value on efficiency.

Much has been written about the synergy and "creative abrasion" of teams. But there can also be problems in team settings, such as conformity, loss of feeling of individual responsibility, groupthink (shared stereotypes, self-censorship, and illusions of invulnerability, unanimity and morality), group polarisation, and formation of acceptable rather than optimum decision-making.

Trust therefore has to maintained at the level of companions, competencies and commitments. Trust is not easy to develop, and requires prolonged interaction and common experiences to promote knowledge-sharing, the authors advise.

One chapter is devoted to HR strategies for managing knowledge work such as personalisation and codification. "HRM policies have an impact in three key areas which influence knowledge work directly: rewards, corporate culture and organisation careers," the authors explain. There are four types of career systems in organisations: academies (fast track), club organisations, star-promoting baseball teams, and fortresses (little commitment to employees).

One chapter each is devoted to communities of practice and innovation. Communities of practice do not appear in typical organisational charts, and should be distinguished from work teams and occupational groups. Personalised story-telling and even jokes are an important form of knowledge sharing in such communities. Communities need to be cultivated and harnessed via connectivity infrastructure, public events, leadership, and sharing of artefacts. Important kinds of knowledge brokers in such communities include boundary spanners, roamers and outposts.

A good example here is Buckman Labs' KM practice ...whose Knowledge Transfer Department (KTD) was created in 1992. The KM system called K-Netix was initially launched on the CompuServe online service, and soon spanned 90 countries, including multilingual forums like EuroForum, LatinoForum, and AAA Forum (for Asia, Australia and Africa). The community knowledge base was maintained by forum specialists, and an educational product based on LearningSpace was rolled out in 1996. The global knowledge-sharing effort has helped increase the sales of products less than 5 years old, from 14 per cent in 1987 to 34.6 per cent in 1996.

Care must be taken to roll out a KM system with a specific purpose in mind, otherwise there is a danger of information overload, increased bureaucracy, and excessive stockpiling of purposeless knowledge.

"Innovation involves different episodes. These can be identified as agenda formation, selection, implementation, and routinisation. These are not linear and sequential but are, more often, overlapping, iterative and recursive," according to the authors.

Each phase calls for different KM strategies and metrics. Key factors which play a role here include cognitive perceptions, social relations, and organisational politics. For instance, knowledge acquisition is a primary activity at the agenda formation stage and is based on a networking approach. Knowledge creation via a community approach is critical in the selection phase, and knowledge storage and re-use based on a cognitive approach are vital for the routinisation stage.

Adequate resources, appropriate breadth and depth of skills and expertise, and boundary-spanning individuals are important components of a knowledge-sharing innovative culture. Regional differences can arise in different parts of the world -- such as Japan as compared to the West -- but the book does not adequately flesh out such differences and ways of jointly harnessing or aligning them for innovation.

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Book Description

This book describes why, for the past twenty-five years, Japanese productivity has been growing more rapidly than productivity in the U.S. Unlike other books on the subject of the Japanese success in manufacturing, it looks at what actually happens in factories. The author brings his experience of working at the Yanagicho Works of the Toshiba Corporation, in Kawasaki City. Like so many Japanese factories, this one is highly productive, efficient, and flexible. While the factory is ordinary looking on the outside, its workers are anything but ordinary as they constantly strive to improve the way they work and the quality of the products they produce. The key to this is the continuous creation and application of knowledge throughout the factory, from workers on the shop floor, to research and development engineers, to top management. Fruin explains how Japanese culture and religion prepare workers for their role in this process of creating and disseminating knowledge.

Managing Complex Projects: Networks, Knowledge and Innovation (Routledge Studies in Technology, Work and Organisations)

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Managing Complex Projects: Networks, Knowledge and Innovation (Routledge Studies in Technology, Work and Organisations)
Neil Alderman , Chris Ivory , Ian McLoughlin , Alfred Thwaites , and Roger Vaughan
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Organizational Behavior | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

MIS | Industries & Professions | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Management | Management & Leadership | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Organizational Behavior | Business Management | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0415299586

Book Description

Concerned with the management of complex long-term engineering projects, this important volume, of great interest to postgraduate students of business, technology management and engineering, reports on a set of rich, novel and unique findings concerning the conduct and management of three high profile and complex projects.

The major investments which constitute complex long-term projects represent an increasingly important source of economic activity, often with particularly significant consequences for economic growth and public policy. This informative volume expertly contributes to broader debates concerning new organizational forms, knowledge management and organizational learning and the management of innovation in project-based settings.

Managing Knowledge: Critical Investigations of Work and Learning

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Managing Knowledge: Critical Investigations of Work and Learning

Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

MIS | Industries & Professions | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Management | Management & Leadership | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

General | Business & Finance | New & Used Textbooks | Stores | Books
ASIN: 0312233639

Book Description

This book questions the naïve, self interested and popularized messages that surround knowledge work and knowledge management. Case studies highlight the politics of new communications technologies which are frequently offered as a means for managing knowledge in the workplace.

End-user computing and knowledge work: Managing the introduction of new information technology (Working paper series / Management Information Systems Research Center, University of Minnesota)

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End-user computing and knowledge work: Managing the introduction of new information technology (Working paper series / Management Information Systems Research Center, University of Minnesota)
James C Brancheau
Manufacturer: Management Information Systems Research Center, Curtis L. Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Knowledge Works: Managing Intellectual Capital at Toshiba

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Knowledge Works: Managing Intellectual Capital at Toshiba
W. Mark Fruin
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OK6VV8

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Managing Knowledge Work

Manufacturer: PALGRAVE
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000HA5UZS

Book Description

"...the most useful, practical book I have seen on the management of turfgrass insect pests...mandatory reading for turfgrass managers in golf, lawns, and sports..." —Dr. James B. Beard, International Sports Turf Institute, Inc.

Written in clear, everyday language, Destructive Turfgrass Insects covers the biology, diagnosis, and control of virtually all the insects and mites that attack warm- and cool-season turfgrasses. No other source gives you as many practical and comprehensive management guidelines for use on golf courses, lawns, and sports fields.

Book Description

This atlas is a revised and updated version of the European Solar Radiation Atlas published in 1984. The revised version contains tables and maps displaying monthly means of global, diffuse and beam solar radiation as well as sunhours for a large number of represenative sites in Europe. Tables show radiation on both horizontal and inclined surfaces. The revisions reflect the political developments in the European Union and within neighbouring countries. The presentation of the tables has been improved and additional information is included. An enlarged text section provides an introduction to the systematics of solar radiation measurement and calculation. The solar data presented in this book is a useful source of information for the estimation of the energy harvest potential for solar systems. The data base is provided on two 3 1/2" disks for more ease in computer assisted design work.

Book Description

This volume presents a selection of reports from scientific projects requiring high end computing resources on the Hitachi SR8000-F1 supercomputer operated by Leibniz Computing Center in Munich. All reports were presented at the joint HLRB and KONWHIR workshop at the Technical University of Munich in October 2002. The following areas of scientific research are covered: Applied Mathematics, Biosciences, Chemistry, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Cosmology, Geosciences, High-Energy Physics, Informatics, Nuclear Physics, Solid-State Physics. Moreover, projects from interdisciplinary research within the KONWIHR framework (Competence Network for Scientific High Performance Computing in Bavaria) are also included. Each report summarizes its scientific background and discusses the results with special consideration of the quantity and quality of Hitachi SR8000 resources needed to complete the research.

Customer Reviews:

A good buy.......2005-03-30

This is the third looseleaf we have purchased from Gower and we found it every bit as useful as the first two. As well as plenty of essential basic background info, ideas for strategy development and implementation etc, it gave us a ready to use program that we were able to easily tailor to our needs and roll out to everyone. I would recommend this book to anyone needing to communicate the fundamentals of KM and its benefits to their staff.

Landfill material.......2003-08-31

This book was very hyped, so I bought it (even though it was very expensive). Imagine my disappointment when it turns up as a binder (even though it is advertised as a hardcover) and is a course in KM. A bad course as well. You can miss this without any regrets. In fact, it could be used as landfill material in my new house, as that is probably the best value I can get out of it?

Amazon.com

Surviving a legend can be hard work. Consider Libbie Custer, widowed after her husband's death at [Little Big Horn], and who spent the next 60 years arguing against Ulysses S. Grant's judgment that "It was Custer who was responsible--and Custer alone--for the deaths of so many."

English writer Jeremy Poolman follows a looping, sometimes loopy path across the world on Libbie Custer's trail, celebrating the life of a decidedly modern, self-assured, even driven woman who lived in a time when women were too often voiceless. Poolman's approach is, well, idiosyncratic: he communes with Custer's ghost, argues the Georgia-born Libbie's case for having married the Yankee Custer at her graveside against a group of unimpressed Southern ladies, and invokes his hard-drinking father, who harbored a scholar's passion for Custeriana, an obsession that "was like a virus (one for which, I know now, there is no cure)." Throughout it all, though, Poolman keeps Libbie Custer well in his sights, telling her tale even as he spins plenty of his own. And quite a tale it is.

It's far from the usual biography, far from the usual journey--but it works, and fans of Western history will enjoy Poolman's wild ride. --Gregory McNamee

Book Description

A vibrant, deeply personal portrait of the wife of General Custer.

Brilliant, inventive, but not in any conventional sense a biography, A Wounded Thing Must Hide is Jeremy Poolman's first foray into nonfiction, taking as its subject the fascinating wife of General Custer. He relates key scenes in Libbie's extraordinary life-her brushes with Empress Elizabeth of Austria, Tsar Alexander III, and Henry James, to name a few-each episode proving rich in relishably surreal detail. We see Libbie ferrying dung from Vienna to St. Petersburg (a present from empress to tsar, to ward off cholera and typhus); taking delivery of the present of a bear from Alex himself; stumbling into a soldier who might perhaps be the great-great-grandfather of Bob Dylan. Throughout it all, we catch glimpses of the glorious, wayward career of the General himself, culminating in the famous slaughter at Little Big Horn.

Far from an aridly factual outline of who did what where, Poolman offers us a vividly, tangibly real re-creation of historical events. He gets to places other biographies can't reach, bleeding, at times, into autobiography. Haunted by the death of his own wife, the narrator follows Libbie's itinerary in search of something unnamed in himself. Through exploring a widow's determination to protect her husband's damaged reputation, he hopes to find a way to deal with his personal loss. By exploring Libbie's and Custer's enduring love and devotion, he finds a form for his own.

Customer Reviews:

Not a straightforward biography.......2004-11-10

If you just want the facts about Libby Custer's life, this would not be the book for you. But it is a very interesting book. Jeremy Poolman writes in a fasinating style, his obession come from his father, but he's obsessed w/Libby, like his dad was obsessed w/Gen. George. When his wife dies, he can't cope, so might as well give into this obession, which takes him around the world, going to the same places she went. He has some unusual friends, who make an appearence, because it is a book as much about Jeremy Poolman, using his obsession to counter his wish to just kill himself, as it is about Libby Custer.
Also since he gives us most of his talks w/people verbatim, I realize he writes as facts, some things he hears from, well just people he runs into. Some guy trying to get him to take a jar of healing horse manure, (no joke) tells him Libby took a jar to the Czar of Russia. He's surprised to hear this, but later writes, that she arrived for her visit w/the Czar w/her jar of horse manure. But we know he has only this one source saying this.
So I don't recommond this as first time biography of Libby Custer. However I highly recommond this as a fasinating piece of litrature. They way he weaves two, & on the rare occasion three conversations/events together, is not in the least confussing, he does it so skillfully. They way you can feel his pain for his wife, and his intention to keep on in spite of that pain, and the resonance of Libby's pain at the loss of her husband is very moving.
So I'm not sure if all of the facts about Mrs. Custer are accurate, I wouldn't have marketed this as a bio. But the book is a grand example of what a book can be written by someone w/skill and a great imagination.

Excellent biography.......2004-04-18

I am a long time admirer of Libby Custer and have devoured many books about her. Poolman's work is unique in that it brings Libby to life in the pages of his book, examines the unexplainable attraction so many of us have to her, and also deals with his own journey to recover from his wife's death. As he seeks to know Libby more intimately, he takes the reader along on his journey quite around the world, introducing us to all the strange characters he meets along the way. I found this book very poignant, touching, refreshing, intelligent and honest (with quite a few humorous moments thrown in), and very well done in dealing with Libby Custer and the Custer history.

unlike any other biagraphy i'v ever read........2003-03-12

You must understand I'd just finished a book on the Sicillian Mafia and thinking this was a strait bio on Libby Custer I didnt get it at frist. But moving thru it, its more then a biagraphy. Its about the whys and hows of keeping lost love alive and of moving on. touching and funny. An entertaining read.

Freaks of the Morning Star: reviewing A Wounded thing. . ........2003-01-28

Poor Libbie Custer (born Elizabeth Bacon). Had to polish her husband's reputation over and over again. Poolman, who had recently dealt with the death of his wife, makes interesting work of his study of the most famous cavalry widow of all--in an attempt to understand the frailties of life. The book is wrapped around Poolman's journey to sanity, and quietly deals with the Custers' relationship and Libbie's long life after the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. You get to actually know a sensitive G.A. Custer, and a fiercely devoted Libbie, who harboured his legend during her journeys around the world.

Also fiercely devoted are all those people who have been hopelessly entraced by the Custer myth, who are just short of, well, nuts. While in Monroe, MI, you can actually go on a tour of the Custer's honeymoon (there wasn't one, so you get to walk on the same sidewalk), and recreate their wedding ceremony. On the anniversary of Custer's death on June 25, you can go to the barber and get a "Custer Cut"--"Custer Cut, Custer Prices". All of this craziness is treated with great humour by Poolman and is almost more interesting than the story of Libbie and her long widowhood.

Sometimes Poolman's modern dialogue is hard to follow, and some parts were a little gratuitous, but all in all, you cannot read this book and not smile, even just a little.

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Sir Arthur Newsholme and State Medicine, 1885-1935.(Review): An article from: Canadian Journal of History
J.T.H. Connor
Manufacturer: University of Saskatchewan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

General | Canada | Americas | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B00098UP4O
Release Date: 2005-07-28

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Canadian Journal of History, published by University of Saskatchewan on April 1, 1999. The length of the article is 902 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Sir Arthur Newsholme and State Medicine, 1885-1935.(Review)
Author: J.T.H. Connor
Publication: Canadian Journal of History (Refereed)
Date: April 1, 1999
Publisher: University of Saskatchewan
Volume: 34 Issue: 1 Page: 131

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Sir Arthur Newsholme and State Medicine, 1885-1935

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Sir Arthur Newsholme and State Medicine, 1885-1935
John M. Eyler
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000N7EO48

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