In Stock Date:
December 15, 2008E-book ISBN-13:
978-1-60649-020-4
E-book ISBN-10:
1-60649-020-6
Conceived just 15 years ago, Knowledge Management (KM) is perhaps the single business discipline about which managers know least. Having spent pots of money investing in the creation of corporate knowledge, the benefits are still marginal.
Now that the boom times are temporarily over, it is perhaps timely that KM can be more fully exploited for it conceals an application indispensable for the foreseeable struggle ahead. Recessions conventionally mean drawing in one’s horns but what if there was another way through the minefield? The neglected KM application this tract will address is the late Peter Drucker’s declared crisis of productivity, his belief being that businesses and other types of organization are largely wasteful in their production. Based on his two books on the subject, this author will uphold the extent of Drucker’s alert (managers, for example, are turning in productivity growth scores lower than before formal mass business education was introduced) and outline how, through two misconceived and under-exploited processes of KM, employers can learn to work more efficiently.
The processes are the better management of their Organizational Memory (OM) and employer-instigated Experiential Learning which, together, can reduce the pandemic of repeated mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons that litter many parts of modern industry and commerce. All aided and abetted by the perceived champion of the workplace, the flexible labor market, which has introduced to industry and commerce the phenomenon of conveyer-belt jobs discontinuity and associated corporate amnesia, the two most corrosive components to good decision-making. Addressing the limitations of conventional approaches, it takes KM to the next level.
Author Biography:
Arnold Kransdorff was the first to identify the phenomenon of corporate amnesia in the early 1980s, soon after the flexible labor market started to make a significant impact on jobs tenure. His first book on the subject (“Corporate Amnesia”, Butterworth Heinemann, 1998) was short listed for the UK’s “Management Book of the Year” in 1999 and selected as one of 800 titles worldwide to launch Microsoft Reader eBooks program in 2000. His second book (“Corporate DNA”, Gower, 2006) expanded the subject to explain how organizations could help their transient managers apply captured knowledge and experience in the cause of better decision-making.
An expert practitioner in Knowledge Management and the leading authority on the consequences of the flexible labor market, his unique speciality is the management of Organizational Memory (OM), the institution-specific know-how accrued from experience that characterises any organization's ability to perform. His work is widely published in academic journals, trade journals and the national press. He has project managed and edited more than a dozen corporate histories, the most efficient vehicle for capturing long-term OM, and pioneered the development of oral debriefings, the equally efficient verbal vehicle to capture short- and medium-term OM. A former financial analyst and industrial commentator for the Financial Times in London, he has won several national and international awards, among them Industrial Feature Writer of the Year (1981) and an Award of Excellence (1997) from Anbar Management Intelligence, the world's leading guide in management journal literature. He has co-supervised a US doctoral thesis on OM, is a guest lecturer at many UK and overseas business schools and a regular speaker at international business conferences. He has assisted in the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce's Inquiry on “Tomorrow's Company”, the Economic and Social Research Council -commissioned study on “Management Research”, the Confederation of British Industry's deliberations on “Flexible Labour Markets” and the Washington, DC-based Corporate Leadership Council’s study on “New Tools for Managing Workforce Stability”.
Contact: ak@corporate-amnesia.com (+44) 01923-896288 or (m) (+44) 07906-059435 or through www.pencorp.co.uk & www.corporate-amnesia.com
