Unconventional Knowledge
With quotations from @BRINT web site

By Mario deSantis, July 12, 1998. (URL: http://www.brint.com/newswire.htm)

Last year, I approached Ms. Lynne Pearson, Dean of Commerce at the University of Saskatchewan, and in submitting my paper "Coping with changes: an overview of the Learning Organization, Knowledge Economy and current practices in Information Technology applications" I suggested that changes could be provided to the curriculums of management and organizational courses. In particular, I made references to the works of Peter Senge (re: "The Fifth Discipline", by Peter M. Senge, Currency Doubleday, 1990, Paperback Edition: October 1994) and Michael Porter (re: "Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors", The Free Press, 60th reprint 1998). The response of Ms. Pearson was to return my paper and in her accompanying letter she mentioned that the university curriculums are revised in accordance to established criteria satisfying the related needs.

It is an absurdity trying to reconcile management philosophies which preach either the assembly line, or the study of mice, or the contingency approach. I told Laurie that there were not happy mediums, and that today's role of a leader is to be an architect, a teacher, a facilitator of changes. In our knowledge economy, where we are all customers of each other, within or out of our organization, we have no "happy medium" management approach beyond the commitment to satisfy the real customer's needs to feel serviceable, cooperative, competent and human.

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrity. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

-- Albert Einstein

Rising to the Stormy Present...

" The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. "

--Abraham Lincoln

 Living in a Man-Made World...

" Scientists must know what man's nature is and what his built-in purposes are if we are to live successfully in an increasingly man-made world. "

-- Norbert Weiner, in The Human Use of Human Beings, Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1954

Believe with Your Understanding...

" Don't believe what your eyes are telling you, all they show is limitation. Believe with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly. "

-- Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull

" Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself. "

-- John Dewey

"Past wisdom must not be a constraint, but something to be challenged."

-- Ghoshal, S. & Bartlett, C.A., in "Rebuilding Behavioral Context: A Blueprint for Corporate Renewal," Sloan Management Review, Winter 1996, pp. 23-36. (Editor's note: Sumantra Ghoshal is with the London Business School where he heads up Stretegic Leadership Research Programme, he has published several articles with Christopher Bartlett and others.)

Successful Technologies Should Resonate With Human Behavior...

"The technologies that will be most successful will resonate with human behaviour instead of working against it. In fact, to solve the problems of delivering and assimilating new technology into the workplace, we must look to the way humans act and react.... In the last 20 years, US industry has invested more than $1 trillion in technology, but has realised little improvement in the efficiency of its knowledge workers and virtually none in their effectiveness. If we could solve the problems of the assimilation of new technology, the potential would be enormous. "

-- John Seely-Brown, in "The Human Factor", Information Strategy, Dec 96-Jan 97. (Editors note: John Seely-Brown is head of Xerox Parc in Palo Alto California)

"The lack of correlation of information technology spending with financial results has led me to conclude that it is not computers that make the difference, but what people do with them. Elevating computerization to the level of a magic bullet of this civilization is a mistake that will find correction in due course. It leads to the diminishing of what matters the most in any enterprise: educated, committed, and imaginative individuals working for organizations that place greater emphasis on people than on technologies."

-- Paul Strassmann, Excerpt from his new book The Squandered Computer

On Learners and the Learned...

"In Time Of Profound Change, The Learners Inherit The Earth, While The Learned Find Themselves Beautifully Equipped To Deal With A World That No Longer Exists."

-- Al Rogers (cited on a listserv... some attribute it to Eric Hofer)

Believe Nothing Unless...

"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."

-- Buddha (cited on a web site in Iceland)

"Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers..."

-- Richard Bach (1977), Illusions:The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

"An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today; knowledge that would probably suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but it is dispersed and unorganized. We need a sort of mental clearing house for the mind: a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared."

-- H.G. Wells in 'The Brain: Organization of the Modern World',1940. (Quoted in a home page signature file)

'Knowing' or 'Not Knowing'?

"The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding, not knowing, blind ignorance. To really understand the Tao is like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?"

-- Lao Tse (Quoted on a Listserv signature file)

"Many modern information systems dysfunctionally add to organizations' inertia. Access to more information and more advanced decision aids does not necessarily make decision makers better informed or more able to decide."

-- Hedberg, B. & Jonsson, S. (1978). "Designing Semi-Confusing Information Systems for Organizations in Changing Environments," Accounting, Organizations, and Society, 3(1), pp. 47-64.

Progress Depends on Unreasonable Men?

"The reasonable man accommodates himself to the ways of the world. The unreasonable man attempts to get the world to accommodate itself to his ways. Progress depends on unreasonable men."

-- George Bernard Shaw (Quoted in a Listserv Message)

"If two people stand at the same place and gaze in the same direction, we must, under pain of solipsism, conclude that they receive closely similar stimuli. But people do not see stimuli; our knowledge of them is highly theoretical and abstract. Instead they have sensations, and we are under no compulsion to suppose that the sensations of our two viewers are the same... Among the few things that we know about it with assurance are: that very different stimuli can produce the same sensations; that the same stimulus can produce very different sensations; and, finally, that the route from stimuli to sensation is in part conditioned by education."

-- Kuhn, T.S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, pp. 192-93. http://businesstech.com/btfreefoundation.html

"The surprise effect of messages, news information will be greater the less probable they are, the less we expect them, the more they come about by chance... The information is greater the less probable it is. In this sense information is 'improbability.'"

-- Fuchs, W.R. (1971). Cybernetics for the Modern Mind, New York: The MacMillan Company.

"A committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling, to do the unnecessary." (F. Allen)

-- Peter, L.J. The Peter Prescription: How to Make Things Go Right, Bantam, NY, 1972.

On Outsourcing and Anorexia Nervosa

"Excellent companies can achieve superior performance without following any standard information technology spending pattern... Only one variable clearly stands out: They don't show any trends toward massive outsourcing... Excellence arises from the way management harmonizes its resources, which are different for each organization. This is why I believe the current fashion of telling companies what their best-practice indicators should be... has questionable merit."

-- Strassmann, Paul A. (1995, Dec. 18). The Myth of Best Practices. Computerworld, p. 88.

"One could say that outsourcing has many of the attributes of a widely prevailing disorder known as "Anorexia nervosa." It is a psychological disturbance involving the refusal to eat to the point of starvation. People with anorexia have a distorted self-image which makes them feel "fat" even when emaciated. Preoccupation with food and low self-esteem, along with emphatic denial of the problem, characterize most anorexics. Similarly, executives in companies with poor financial performance seem to concentrate on downsizing as the preferred method for restoring competitiveness."

-- Strassmann, Paul A. (1995, Aug. 21). Outsourcing: A Game for Losers. Computerworld, p. 75.

"Sourcing amounts to renting the skills and competences of a potential competitor. Renting may appear cheap relative to ownership (and a large mortgage), but the lease may not be renewed or the rent may be dramatically increased. Furthermore, you are accumulating little if any technological knowledge (equity) and are unlikely to benefit if the skills and competences appreciate in value due to future business opportunities that cannot be clearly foreseen."

-- Bettis, R.A., S.P. Bradley and G. Hamel (1992), "Outsourcing and Industrial Decline,"Academy of Management Executive, 6, 1, 7-22.

Of Humans and their 'Central Concerns'?

"A good business novel or business biography is not about business. It is about love, hate, craftsmanship, jealousy, comradeship, ambition, pleasure. These have been, and will continue to be, man's central concerns."

-- Simon, H.A. (1977). The New Science of Management Decision, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, p. 134.

"Knowledge is power, which is why people who had it in the past often tried to make a secret of it. In post-capitalism, power comes from transmitting information to make it productive, not from hiding it."

--Drucker, P.F. (1995). "The Post-Capitalist Executive," in Managing in a Time of Great Change, Penguin, New York, NY. http://sirius.cba.ohiou.edu/~oumba/paper2.html http://www.brint.com/forbes.htm

"[I]t is rather ironic that the application of artificial intelligence to manufacturing is becoming a popular topic. If intelligence is so helpful to manufacturing in artificial form, then why have the benefits of the real intelligence overlooked so far." (Safizadeh, M.H.)

-- Pfeffer, J. (1994).Competitive Advantage through People: Unleashing the Power of the Work Force, Harvard Business School Press, MA.

Imagination: More Important than Knowledge?

"Imagination is more important than Knowledge."

-- Albert Einstein cited in Osborn,A.F. (1985). Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Problem-Solving, Charles Scribner's Sons, Bombay, India

"Successful knowledge transfer involves neither computers nor documents but rather interactions between people."

-- Davenport, T.H. "Think Tank: The Future of Knowledge Management," CIO, December 15, 1995. (Editor's Note: Thomas Davenport is the guru on Knowledge Management holding conferences in major centres and with his own institution promoting the concept. He is a University Professor in Texas.) http://www.accustaff.com/3-98_Insights.html http://www.oramag.com/archives/38/38ind2.htm

"Solutions...are a temporary event, specific to a context, developed through the relationship of persons and circumstances."

-- Wheatley, M.J. quoted in Stuart, A. "Elusive Assets," CIO, November 15, 1995, pp. 28-34.

"Every scientific field has a sense of history. It atrophies if it cuts itself off from curiosity, diversity and reflection. Many of our colleagues in other fields are frankly bored with what they do and a little worried that their work is partly making the emperor some new clothes. Most of us have chosen to work in MIS because it is enjoyable and relevant to some wider concerns."

--- Keen, Peter G.W. (1980). "MIS Research: Reference Disciplines and a Cumulative Tradition."Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information Systems, Philadelphia, PA, December 8-10, 9-18, p. 18. (Editor's note: That "MIS" had me going but it is Managing Information Systems)

"The computer is merely a tool in the process...To put it in editorial terms, knowing how a typewriter works does not make you a writer. Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information."

--Drucker, P.F. (1995). "The Post-Capitalist Executive," in Managing in a Time of Great Change, Penguin, New York, NY.

"From a management point of view, the current division of human knowledge into disciplines is managerially stupid and an often evil design of science, which blocks off inquiry into critical issues because the issues don't fit into the disciplines."

-- Churchman, C.W. "Management Science: Science of Managing and Managing of Science,"Interfaces, 24(4), July-August 1994, pp. 99-110. http://businesstech.com/btfreefoundation.html

"Unlike capital, knowledge is most valuable when it is controlled and used by those on the front lines of the organization."

-- Bartlett, C.A. & Ghoshal, S. "Changing the Role of the Top Management: Beyond Systems to People," Harvard Business Review, May-June 1995, pp. 132-142

"The best information environments will take advantage of the ability of IT to overcome geography but will also acknowledge that the highest bandwidth network of all is found between the water fountain and the coffee machine."

-- Davenport, T.H. "Think Tank: The Virtual and the Physical," CIO, November 15, 1995.

"Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in this world that just don't add up."

-- J. Magary