The second in the readers' series, Resources for the Knowledge-Based Economy, Knowledge In Organisations gives an overview of how knowledge is valued and used in organisations. It gives readers excellent grounding in how best to understand the highest valued asset they have in their organisations.

Describes the importance of knowledge to today's organizations.
Offers insight into how knowledge can be obtained and cultivated.
Provides a variety of persepctives, including sociology, economics, and management science.

Why human skills and expertise, not technical tools, are what make projects succeed.

The project is the basic unit of work in many industries. Software applications, antiviral vaccines, launch-ready spacecraft: all were produced by a team and managed as a project. Project management emphasizes control, processes, and tools—but, according to The Smart Mission, that is not the right way to run a project. Human skills and expertise, not technical tools, are what make projects successful. Projects run on knowledge. This paradigm-shifting book—by three project management experts, all of whom have decades of experience at NASA and elsewhere—challenges the conventional wisdom on project management, focusing on the human dimension: learning, collaboration, teaming, communication, and culture.

The authors emphasize three themes:

• projects are fundamentally about how teams work and learn together to get things done
• the local level—not an organization’s upper levels—is where the action happens
• projects don’t operate in a vacuum but exist within organizations that are responsible to stakeholders

Drawing on examples and case studies from NASA and other organizations, the authors identify three project models—micro, macro, and global—and their different knowledge needs. Successful organizations have a knowledge-based culture. Successful project management guides the interplay of knowledge, projects, and people.

This book is the story of how four busy executives, from different backgrounds and different perspectives, were surprised to find themselves converging on the idea of narrative as an extraordinarily valuable lens for understanding and managing organizations in the twenty-first century. The idea that narrative and storytelling could be so powerful a tool in the world of organizations was initially counter-intuitive. But in their own words, John Seely Brown, Steve Denning, Katalina Groh, and Larry Prusak describe how they came to see the power of narrative and storytelling in their own experience working on knowledge management, change management, and innovation strategies in organizations such as Xerox, the World Bank, and IBM. Storytelling in Organizations lays out for the first time why narrative and storytelling should be part of the mainstream of organizational and management thinking. This case has not been made before. The tone of the book is also unique. The engagingly personal and idiosyncratic tone comes from a set of presentations made at a Smithsonian symposium on storytelling in April 2001. Seely Brown. The prose is probing, playful, provocative, insightful and sometime profound. It combines the liveliness and freshness of spoken English with the legibility of a ready-friendly text. Interviews will all the authors done in 2004 add a new dimension to the material, allowing the authors to reflect on their ideas and clarify points or highlight ideas that may have changed or deepened over time.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book is the story of how four busy executives, from different backgrounds and different perspectives, were surprised to find themselves converging on the idea of narrative as an extraordinarily valuable lens for understanding and managing organizations in the twenty-first century. The idea that narrative and storytelling could be so powerful a tool in the world of organizations was initially counter-intuitive. But in their own words, John Seely Brown, Steve Denning, Katalina Groh, and Larry Prusak describe how they came to see the power of narrative and storytelling in their own experience working on knowledge management, change management, and innovation strategies in organizations such as Xerox, the World Bank, and IBM. Storytelling in Organizations lays out for the first time why narrative and storytelling should be part of the mainstream of organizational and management thinking. This case has not been made before. The tone of the book is also unique. The engagingly personal and idiosyncratic tone comes from a set of presentations made at a Smithsonian symposium on storytelling in April 2001. Reading it is as stimulating as spending an evening with Larry Prusak or John Seely Brown. The prose is probing, playful, provocative, insightful and sometime profound. It combines the liveliness and freshness of spoken English with the legibility of a ready-friendly text. Interviews will all the authors done in 2004 add a new dimension to the material, allowing the authors to reflect on their ideas and clarify points or highlight ideas that may have changed or deepened over time.

Over the past decade, knowledge and learning have emerged as the keys to economic success and as a focus for thinking about organizational effectiveness and innovation. An overwhelming majority of large organizations now engage in a wide range of knowledge and learning activities and nearly all have programs and personnel explicitly dedicated to these tasks. The volume is targeted at those new to knowledge and learning, and is filled with practical examples and focuses on the most critical issues, featuring seminal contributions from leading authorities including: * Thomas Davenport, * Dorothy Leonard, * John Seely Brown, * Sidney Winter, * W. Chan Kim, * Peter Druckard. The book is organized around the three key steps in managing knowledge: development, retention, and transfer. These sections are preceded by a section creating the strategic context for knowledge and followed by a section on the social dimensions that are often overlooked. Finally, the book looks to the future of knowledge and learning. This Reader is an accessible way for executives and students taking advanced Management Studies and executive courses to learn from the latest examples on this topic.

Over the past decade, knowledge and learning have emerged as the keys to economic success and as a focus for thinking about organizational effectiveness and innovation. An overwhelming majority of large organizations now engage in a wide range of knowledge and learning activities and nearly all have programs and personnel explicitly dedicated to these tasks. The volume is targeted at those new to knowledge and learning, and is filled with practical examples and focuses on the most critical issues, featuring seminal contributions from leading authorities including: * Thomas Davenport, * Dorothy Leonard, * John Seely Brown, * Sidney Winter, * W. Chan Kim, * Peter Druckard. The book is organized around the three key steps in managing knowledge: development, retention, and transfer. These sections are preceded by a section creating the strategic context for knowledge and followed by a section on the social dimensions that are often overlooked. Finally, the book looks to the future of knowledge and learning. This Reader is an accessible way for executives and students taking advanced Management Studies and executive courses to learn from the latest examples on this topic.

This is a book about creating information systems within firms that will truly give managers the information they need to make informed business decisions. The author contends that information is part of an ecological system in which it undergoes a process of evolution and adaptation to the requirements of the local users. The book explains ecological planning tools that guide managers to develop information systems to meet their changing needs.