A friend recently gave me a copy of Blue Ocean Strategy, a business management book from 2005. The concept is very compelling, create new markets rather than struggle with increased competition for existing, shrinking markets. The authors call these new markets Blue Oceans. The competitive markets are Red Oceans, for all the blood in
A Business Case for Enterprise Social Networking
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the differences between information and knowledge and the categorical mistake that even many KMers make by conflating the two. However, knowledge is often further sub-categorized into two realms, tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. These can also get kind of confusing. Tacit knowledge exists only in the minds
News from the CorpTechPocalypse
It’s been over six months since I first warned of the coming Corporate Technology Apocalypse on this blog. In the last few weeks, I think corporate IT has gotten a couple of new nails in its coffin.
The first came in the form of a splashy infographic from Unisys called The Great IT Freezeout,
Coffee and the IT Guy
Nick Milton at Knoco Stories has a great post today on KM and the coffee machine metaphor. It’s a commonly used explanation of KM and it’s often used to justify Social Media adoption. The idea is that SM will facilitate the transfer of knowledge like the coffee machine does. People bump into each other serendipitously
Confusing Information and Knowledge
Last week someone tweeted a link to an article called “Who owns knowledge?” Fascinating title, right up my alley, couldn’t wait to read it. So I clicked away to the page hoping to find the answer to this esoteric question. Of course, the article was actually about copyright on legal documents, and it’s
Don't Speak Social? You're Just Reading Lips in Spanish
For the last few weeks, I’ve been on iTunesU listening to Human Behavioral Biology lectures by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford University. (Why, what do you listen to while jogging?) It’s a fascinating subject and Sapolsky is an incredible lecturer, I highly recommend the course if you’re interested in such things. On Saturday, I listened to
Enough with the “Social Media” already
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| [Image (cc) quinnanya] |
I don’t know who coined the term “Social Media” but I’d love to wring their neck. I think the name single handedly prevents widespread enterprise adoption of powerful tools. In common parlance Social = Party and Media = Entertainment. You might as well be asking your Executive Officer for 200 grand
The Principles of Nanagement: Taking micro-management to the next scale
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| [Image (CC) by Kevin Dooley] |
In recent years our formerly robust micro-management movement has come under attack. We have seen business-as-usual nearly destroyed within so-called “forward thinking” companies like Google, with their 20% time and free food and laundry. Sure, you and I know those things are just a ploy to keep their sheep-loyees
A Shortsighted Solution: "Focus KM Where the Revenue Is"
In my last post, I made a particularly provocative assertion that the Legal KM community was primarily made up of lawyers and that their being lawyers clouded their interpretation of KM in a legal environment so that they were missing the KM needs of at least 50% of the firm, specifically, the staff. I
Once Were Lawyers
A few weeks ago I wrote a post attempting to define KM. It was simplistic and possibly naïve, but you have to start somewhere. Since then, I’ve come to realize that beyond a conceptual understanding of KM, you shouldn’t waste too much time trying to define it. The search for a single definition that