Knowledge Management: The Death of Wisdom: Why Our Companies Have Lost It—and How They Can Get It Back

This book is about an unintended—and unnoticed—consequence that is needlessly costing commerce and industry an unimaginable amount of money. It was in the early 1980s that someone smart thought that the flexible labor market would allow employers to quickly adapt their workforce to the new industrial technology-led revolution. It did, but the trouble is that nobody thought of the downside consequences— short jobs tenure and the continual loss of the organizations' unique, hard-won and expensively acquired knowledge and experience. Inside, you'll learn how employers can continue to take advantage of the flexible labor market while holding on to their special knowledge and experience. It's a way of recovering lost continuity, allowing rolling generations of employees to learn more effectively from tried-and-tested experience and thus improve their decision making. Called experiential learning that has been adapted to the modern workplace, it's a way of helping to banish all those repeated mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons that litter modern industry and commerce.

Table of Contents:

• Author's Credentials ...............................................................................ix
• Preface ..................................................................................................xi
• Chapter 1 Th e Race Where Every Sprinter Drops the Baton ..............1
• Chapter 2 Getting from A to B Without Going Via Z ....................11
• Chapter 3 Here Today, Gone Tomorrow ...........................................29
• Chapter 4 Opportunity Knocks for Business Education ...................39
• Chapter 5 "I Forgot to Remember!" ................................................57
• Chapter 6 Th e Smart March to Wisdom ..........................................79
• Chapter 7 How the Baton was Passed ..............................................97
• Chapter 8 Way to Go .....................................................................103
• Appendix: Checkbooks and Boxing Gloves: Origins of the Author's Interest .................................................................................107
• Notes..................................................................................................113
• References ...........................................................................................123
• Bibliography .......................................................................................131
• Index .................................................................................................135

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".