Book Review: Havard Business Review on Knowledge Management

Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management is a collection of 8 different articles on the way companies approach or should approach to knowledge management. 

The first article by Peter Drucker emphasizes the need of knowledge management in  information based organizations and suggest developing clear simple objectives and a structure for sharing information. Drucker sees motivating and rewarding specialists as one of the challenges for the information based organizations. 

The article on 'Knowledge Creating Company',  Ikujiro Nonaka the focuses on tacit knowledge and calls it as 'soft' aspect. The article carries illustrative examples of of Japanese companies such as Honda, Canon, Matsushita and Sharp. The articles supports a fresh approach towards managerial roles and responsibilities, organizational design, and business practices in the knowledge creating company. 

Davidn Garvin in the article "Building a Learning Organization" raises three critical dimensions of building a learning organization: 

1. an easy to apply definition of learning organization

2. unambiguous operational guidelines

3. tools for measuring organizational learning

Garvin considers five activities essential for learning: systematic problem solving, experimentation for new approaches, learning from past experience, learning from best practices and transferring of knowledge. 

In 'Teaching Smart People How to Learn' Chris Argylis highlights the human behavior related issues that act as hindering blocks for learning. He substantiate his points with the example of a US based consulting firm and explains why well educated professionals block learning process and suggests ways companies could improve the ability of their managers and professional to learn. 

'Putting Your Company's Whole Brain to Work' by Dorothy Leonard and Susaan Stratus focuses on how managers must understand that their is no single approach to learning and people with diverse back ground, different approach towards problems solving should understand one another and contribute to the organizational processes. The authors explain this with their experience with organizations. 

Art Kleiner and George Roth in 'How to Make Experience Your Company's Best Teacher' elaborate on a tool called the learning history developed by a group of scientists, business managers and journalists of MIT. The authors believe that the tool is useful for knowledge management process of organization. 

'Research That Reinvent the Corporation' by John Seely Brown discusses the need of designing of new technological and organizational architectures that make a continuously innovating company a reality. 

In 'Managing Professional Intellect' James Brian Quinn, Phillip Anderson and Sydney Finkelstein offer best practices for creating professional intellect. The authors also discuss the four levels of operation of professional intellect: cognitive knowledge, advanced skills, systems understanding and self-motivated creativity.