Community as a form of collaboration

Bounded rationality furnishes the theoretical basis for collaboration. When problem complexity is overwhelming, divide-and-conquer is often an effective problem-solving approach. For many years before the Internet got so convenient, collaboration takes place within the department or the corporation. Communities formed within the organizational boundary, when operating with momentum, unit more brain power into a great value-producing system. The communities that involve the whole world, as radical as it seems, have been demonstrated to be a great business thinking for some companies in certain sectors.

Open innovation through various types of community has captured much attention of mass media. IBM joins effort with the open source software community and puts linux and Apache at the center of their core products. A significant portion of new products produced every year is the result of networking with people they did not hire. Counting amazon, eBay. jeep drivers, Mac users, ..., you'll notice that community, like knowledge, is everywhere. Can one imagine several years ago that community management would turn out to be a core competency of managers and organizations in the knowledge economy?

Inductive learning and deductive learning

Inductive reasoning generalizes and deductive reasoning tests the generalization on a specific case. Effective learning requires both.

Similarly, tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge are essential components of an upward spiral. One prompts the other to elevate our level of knowledge. Converting explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge involves the act of internalizing what we learn. Making tacit knowledge explicit reinforces better and deeper understanding of what vaguely and fuzzily exists in our knowledge base. Not a dichotomy, but more a continuum. It's just like water exists in both the liquid and vapor form most of the time.

Wisdom matters the most

Can one be both knowledgeable and stupid? Of course!
One can knowingly ignore the long term and opt for the short term benefit.
Or, knowingly put one factor above everything else that ought to be considered.
That is, wisdom has to to with perspective and priority. And the issue of perspective and priority is tied to the notion of significance. Significance is not a mind work. It is what one treasures out of heart. At least, it is a good blend of mind and heart.

Interesting! from knowledge management point of view, running a business requires both mind and heart. Pursuing a career also requires both mind and heart. Business world is not supposed to be hard and cold. Work is supposed to be an integral part of life. There is always something that can be done to improve the status quo. Enjoying the fun of improving harmonizes work and pleasure, and thus links work and study directly to significance. At the very basic level, one is motivated by the sense of significance.

Blog for reflective learning

When used as a study tool, blog support reflective learning. Employee can blog to keep a detailed record of what's learned and tried. Team members can blog to stimulate ach other's thinking. When practiced in a disciplined manner, blog enhances personal knowledge management and support collaboration. Blogs can be inter-linked into a knowledge network and form a community of practice. The scope of the community often extends far beyond organizational boundary.

Sounds straight-forward, and yet rarely taken seriously. Actually, most widely known habits share the same destiny: regular working out, no procrastination, planning ahead, leaving 10 minutes early to avoid traffic,...

It's hard enough for individuals, and it's even much more challenging for an organization to build collective memory using such tools as blogs. That also explains why knowledge management is a core competency for any organizations.

Knowledge appropriability and competitive advantage

While praising the act of sharing, knowledge management does not ignore the importance of the type of knowledge that is proprietary and increases the power of the product/service or process that contains that knowledge. When the knowledge appropriability level is high, it is difficult to be replicated or imitated. The benefit created by the knowledge lasts longer.

Knowledge appropriabiity is due to the very nature of the knowledge. It can also be the result of patent or copyright protection. The legal mechanism is necessary in order to provide incentive for knowledge workers to pursue innovative activities. It is clear that intellectual property right protection can hamper further innovation. From the government policy point of view, the key is to find the balance between too much and not enough.

Knowledge is power

"Knowledge is power." said Sir Francis Bacon. It is truer today than it was some 400 years ago when Bacon made the statement.

A knowledgeable firm competes better than one that is not. Knowledge is the true source of competitive advantage in the knowledge economy. To provide innovative product/service in the innovative way, firms must work diligently to replenish and deploy their knowledge stock.

The statement shouldn't be misinterpreted to justify knowledge hoarding behaviors by individual employees, however. The tricky thing about knowledge is that knowledge must get updated and upgraded to remain valuable. Sharing what you know can deepen your understanding and increases your knowledge. The notion of "knowledge is power" supports knowledge sharing, not knowledge hoarding. The organizational culture that encourages and rewards knowledge sharing as well as knowledge creation is an essential component of an innovative organization.

Wealth as an example of increasing returns

The value of an asset increases faster than the increase of the asset itself. Computer network is a typical example. Community of practice also is mentioned quite often. Innovative capability increases with the experience of innovating. Adding a complementary asset to the asset portfolio can create benefit similar to increasing returns.

Is wealth an example of IR as well?

The first $20 given to an empty-pocket person creates excitement. The fifth time $20 is given to the same person probably would not create as much excitement as the first time did. This is a typical example of diminishing return of utility in the physical world.

What about"the more you already have, the more you want to have?"

Yes, the more money you have already had, the hungrier you may be for even more money if you believe money makes you happy. That would be increasing return in a different sense.

To blog or not to blog, that is not the question

It's fun to turn the pages of a family photo album. They help bring back lots of memories long after the events happened. It's also fun to read the diary that logged your mind, your heart, and your life. It's hard to imagine a society that does not have any record of of things, big and small, that involve its members as days go by. The reality is that what's not captured is typically much more than what actually gets recorded. What a waste of "natural resource"!

To blog or not to blog? If a company executive asks me this question regarding the company policy, I would quickly say, "Go ahead, of course." The question should be how to encourage employee blogging so that everybody not only benefits as a result but also enjoys the process. This is a great new corporate ethic: perform and enjoy. Of course there are concerns. It takes time. Company secret may leak out. Well, there's no such thing that is risk-free in the real world.

The question, therefore, is how to make it work well.

Tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge

Explicit knowledge is visible and readily sharable. Tacit knowledge only resides in the head and doesn't easily get exchanged.

Knowledge expressed and represented in a certain visible form can be distributed and shared among users. Explicit knowledge can be validated and examined more conveniently than tacit knowledge. Accounting statements, for example, convey measurement information regarding various types of resources and business transactions. Ideas about new product/service design, however, are not always easy to describe in words, text, or pictures. We all have been dealing with explicit knowledge (such as this blog). We all also have a lot of tacit knowledge about the things we are familiar with (such as life).

Most people agree that, relatively speaking, explicit knowledge is no more than the part of iceberg above the water surface, and tacit knowledge is that part beneath.

Less is discussed as to which comes first.

When learning to drive, we first heard instruction spoken out and watched actions and movements demonstrated. After much practicing, we drive in a way that the vehicle seems to have been united with you. Every part of you acts in synchronization with other parts of your body and mind. Explicit knowledge get internalized and becomes tacit knowledge.

An expert strives to turn lots of explicit knowledge into tacit in developing expertise. Then they are asked to transfer what they keep in their head to a form that can be put in the systems. Upon more thoughts, I found that this is similar to chicken-or-egg problem. It's a mutually reinforcing cycle, an ongoing process of induction and deduction. I guess some specific examples would serve well on this point.

Is KM a new thing?

Everybody has been practicing knowledge management all the time. But recognizing the strategic value of knowledge and treating it as a source of competitive advantage for all companies is a recent enlightenment in organizational management. The term KM does not even have to be used to label the activities that in essence is related to knowledge management. As a matter of fact, some people deliberately avoid use of KM just to reduce confusion and controversy (not everybody agrees that knowledge can be managed).

It's less controversial that innovation is crucial in enhancing an organization's competitiveness. It's also clear that new knowledge must be constantly created and deployed to innovate. Explicit knowledge can be managed directly. But tacit knowledge can only be managed through people network. If we don't overly simplify the point of argument, there would not be so much confusion. It's like human resource management. How do you management human resource? The asnwer would depend on what you mean by managing. Right?