Articles
The Recipe For Success
We behave, much of the time, as though it were possible to take a couple of hundred successful entrepreneurs, put them into a juicer, and create an entrepreneurship tonic. Let’s say we wanted to commercialise this idea and start a business around it. The entrepreneur wastage from our juicing technique would be high, and may not be popular. So we’d call in some analytical chemists and possibly bio-engineering experts, to identify the critical ingredients in our organically produced entrepreneurship tonic. Then we’d look for artificial substitutes, and make millions from our recipe.
Posted by edgar on 27/03/03 at 06:01 PM | Categories: Leadership | Permalink
Leading From The Jet Stream
Singapore’s corporate leadership has had a bad press of late, not least in the government-linked sector. In September 2002 a report from International Survey
Research (ISR) cited Singapore’s workers as the second most “bo chap” (Hokkien for indifferent) in the world (Japan was bottom). A storm of outrage and debate erupted, local business schools and unionists sprang to the workers’ defence, and very quickly it turned into a question of blame: fingers pointed at Singapore’s managers.
Posted by edgar on 27/03/03 at 05:58 PM | Categories: Leadership | Permalink
Knowledge-Based CRM
This article focuses on proactive Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It does not explicitly examine the reactive activities involved in customer support and dealing with feedback. Proactive CRM has two laws, three main activities and depends on two main tools.
Posted by edgar on 27/03/03 at 05:55 PM | Categories: KM Applied | Permalink
What Does KM Mean for Law Firms?
One of the biggest myths about knowledge management is that it is a spanking new methodology to help organizations gain more advantage in the new economy. It’s not. Knowledge management, and knowledge work, have always been with us. To manage at all, is to manage knowledge, in the sense that the manager must use information, collaboration and the application of her own acquired experience in making good decisions. And lawyers, above all, know how to manage their knowledge. From the Code of Hammurabi almost four thousand years ago to modern law reports and Lexis-Nexis, the practice of law has been a practice of knowledge, requiring accurate, effective and objective use of information.
Posted by edgar on 27/03/03 at 05:53 PM | Categories: KM Applied | Permalink
The Chemistry of Time
By around 1778 or 1779, the Scottish chemist and entrepreneur James Keir had spent a decade seeking a commercial process for the production of alkalis. Alkalis had been used in the glass industry and in the glazing process for pottery for centuries. However, demand was growing rapidly throughout the 18 th century, with a growing market for soap (made by mixing alkalis with oil and then curdling it with salt) and for its use as a bleaching agent in the booming textile industry…
Posted by edgar on 27/03/03 at 05:27 PM | Categories: KM Critiqued | Permalink
Innovation Tunnelling
Singapore has an innovation problem it doesn’t yet fully recognise, and that is the dominance of the engineering mindset here. It’s a theme I’ll explore more fully in a subsequent article, but for now it’s enough to notice that while engineers can be brilliant problem solvers, they can only address innovation in limited ways: as clearly defined problems, stable enough and specifiable enough to be able to plot routes towards a solution. And measurable enough to know whether you got there successfully. The result is an unambitious view of innovation as improvement rather than radical adaptation. A study we conducted early this year found that two thirds of managers here see innovation as a matter for incremental improvements rather than radically new ideas.
Posted by edgar on 20/12/02 at 06:28 PM | Categories: Innovation | Permalink
The Engineer’s Dilemma: Innovation in Singapore
If you look at how Singapore approaches innovation, it looks very much like an engineering problem. Rule-bound, risk-averse Singapore is the problem, and the output we want is more innovation. So being engineers, we have to figure out what new input to the system will produce that output. Simple, right?
Posted by edgar on 20/12/02 at 06:27 PM | Categories: Innovation | Permalink
The Knowledge Wizards: Hope in a Time of Darkness
I have been asked to write about libraries and their role in an increasingly knowledge-powered economy. April 24-26, Singapore plays host to the World Library Summit, with the theme: “Global Knowledge Renaissance”. The best and the finest will gather to learn about the future of knowledge, knowledge management and knowledge opportunities in governance, society and business. “We want people, and especially businesses, to understand the critical role that libraries, and this summit, can play in creating knowledge opportunities for Singapore and the region” says National Library Board Assistant Chief Executive R. Ramachandran.
Posted by edgar on 20/12/02 at 05:45 PM | Categories: KM Critiqued | Permalink
Accounting for Knowledge Management
In the late fourteenth century, a busy Italian merchant named Datini, ordered twenty-nine sacks of wool from Spain. It would be three and a half years before the cloth made from the wool finally reached him.1 Business in the middle ages was complex, with a multitude of different and complicated transactions at different stages of their cycles, and spread all over the known world – including the trading routes of Asia. Each major trading city had its own currencies, sets of weights and measures, and business regulations. The business of the time had many uncertainties associated with it. Information flows were unreliable
and slow, risk of war, theft or loss from other means was high…
Posted by edgar on 19/10/02 at 05:36 PM | Categories: KM Critiqued | Permalink
The Autism of Knowledge Management
There is a profound and dangerous autism in the way we describe knowledge management and e-learning. At its root is an obsessive fascination with the idea of knowledge as content, as object, and as manipulable artefact. It is accompanied by an almost psychotic blindness to the human experiences of knowing, learning, communicating, formulating, recognising, adapting, miscommunicating, forgetting, noticing, ignoring, choosing, liking, disliking, remembering and misremembering.
Posted by edgar on 02/07/02 at 05:34 PM | Categories: KM Critiqued | Permalink