Book Description
This is a comprehensive and multidisciplinary work providing an excellent introduction to economic development. Readers build a greater understanding on subjects including: economics, political science, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, international relations, gender, and Third World studies.
Customer Reviews:
An interesting approach to development issues.......2000-06-10
Most books approach the subject of development with a relatively narrow focus. Some books provide a broad-based approach to economic development, others address environmentally sensitive development, and a few broach the subject of equitable development. This book effectively meshes these often divergent subjects into one general, but ultimately workable, approach to economic development.
Certainly, no single book provides the necessary backgound to assist practitioners, elected officials, or community activists. However, this book provides a good starting point for a general, self-education in development issues.
Brilliant, insightful theorizing based on data.......1999-06-25
A very informative theoetical examination of what works in development based on thoughtful analysis of what has worked and what has not worked. Breaks the stereotypes of polictics and ideology that have been so central to development. Combines economic, political and social perspectives that remind me of the best of Max Weber. Wonderful book! A must read.
Amazon.com
When new-car developers at Ford Motor Company wanted to learn why the original Taurus design team was so successful, no one could tell them. No one remembered or had recorded what made that effort so special; the knowledge gained in the Taurus project was lost forever. Indeed, the most valuable asset in any company is probably also its most elusive and difficult to manage: knowledge. Authors Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak assert that learning how to identify, manage, and foster knowledge is vital for companies who hope to compete in today's fast-moving global economy.
Working Knowledge examines how knowledge can be nurtured in organizations. Building trust throughout a company is the key to creating a knowledge-oriented corporate culture, a positive environment in which employees are encouraged to make decisions that are efficient, productive, and innovative. The book includes numerous examples of successful knowledge projects at companies such as British Petroleum, 3M, Mobil Oil, and Hewlett-Packard. Concise and clearly written, Working Knowledge is an excellent resource for managers who want to better harness the experience and wisdom within their organizations.
Book Description
The definitive primer on knowledge management, this book will establish the enduring vocabulary and concepts and serve as the hands-on resource of choice for fast companies that recognize knowledge as the only sustainable source of competitive advantage. Drawing on their work with more than 30 knowledge-rich firms, the authors-experienced consultants with a track record of success-examine how all types of companies can effectively understand, analyze, measure, and manage their intellectual assets, turning corporate knowledge into market value. They consider such questions as: What key cultural and behavioral issues must managers address to use knowledge effectively?; What are the best ways to incorporate technology into knowledge work?; What does a successful knowledge project look like-and how do you know when it has succeeded? In the end, say the authors, the human qualities of knowledge-experience, intuition, and beliefs-are the most valuable and the most difficult to manage. Applying the insights of Working Knowledge is every manager's first step on that rewarding road to long-term success.
Download Description
This influential book establishes the enduring vocabulary and concepts in the burgeoning field of knowledge management. It serves as the hands-on resource of choice for companies that recognize knowledge as the only sustainable source of competitive advantage going forward. Drawing from their work with more than thirty knowledge-rich firms, Davenport and Prusak--experienced consultants with a track record of success--examine how all types of companies can effectively understand, analyze, measure, and manage their intellectual assets, turning corporate wisdom into market value. They categorize knowledge work into four sequential activities--accessing, generating, embedding, and transferring--and look at the key skills, techniques, and processes of each. While they present a practical approach to cataloging and storing knowledge so that employees can easily leverage it throughout the firm, the authors caution readers on the limits of communications and information technology in managing intellectual capital.
Customer Reviews:
Learning knowledge that works.......2007-09-20
This book was used in my introductory class of a Knowledge Management course and helped me understand the course very well. The book is easy to read even for a knowledge management subject matter book. You can even read this book in any order and still get the author's point of view explicitly.
Excellent book and user guide.......2007-05-14
An organization can benefit immensely from its knowledge capital asset through the implementation of various KM projects, this book explains how and provides a guide. As an enabler, KM practices can be used to achieve various organizational objectives leveraging on the simple and easy to grasp concepts in this book. I love the examples of organizations cited and how they overcame their KM project challenges and where some others failed.
For anyone interested in Knowledge Management, this book is an excellent buy. Working Knowledge does not only introduce one to the concepts of KM, but also gives indept examples of organizations that have made KM a culture and how they strategically take advantage of this process to achieve specific benefits. It guides the reader on how to implement KM, technologies, failure signs to watch out for and much more. In my opinion, it is a worthy guide towards implementation.
I am glad I bought this book and I recommend it to anyone interested in KM.
Another great book about KM.......2007-02-12
Nice work about KM, they are focus on what KM is. Nice KM reading.
Good Primer, Short on Technology and Case Studies.......2005-12-07
Thomas Davenport is a well know expert on the subject of Knowledge Management. His book, Working Knowledge, is a quick read excellent for passing time on an airplane or subway. Yet, it is a bit light on specific implementations of KM. In particular, it would have been nice to illustrate a case study or two. Given that his employer is Accenture, I would have expected a little more on the lifecycle of a KM implementation in a large corporation, even if it was at a high level.
Unfortunately, the text is also fails to describe the rapidly evolving KM technology landscape. In the boom years of the late 1990's, significant activity in the development of corporate portals, eLearning, and adaptive technologies occurred. Davenport fails to recognize any of these factors in his discussion of KM.
A Classic on KM.......2005-05-31
This is an outstanding book written by two well-respected practitioners. Davenport is the Director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change; Prusak is the Executive Director of the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management.
This book is full of real-world examples and practical ideas. There are valuable chapters on knowledge creation, knowledge codification, and knowledge transfer. There is also a very good chapter on the pragmatics of KM.
Michael Beitler
Author of "Strategic Organizational Learning"
Customer Reviews:
Excellent Buy - A must have .......2007-09-17
I have read a number of Tom's books, but this one beats them all (I am saving up to buy another one!). The knowledge worker is an essential ingredient for innovation. Fascinating title, well prepared and perfectly laid out thoughts and a simple style writing makes this book a choice material for anyone seeking personal development or involved in self-directed learning. This book is a true blessing and I am glad I bought it. It is a steady reference for my knowledge management project and hopefully, practice.
The average knowledge worker believes in his skills and he can not be taken for granted. Davenport describes the knowledge worker's attributes fully and provides employers and senior management a new direction on how to view their organizational assets. It also helps the knowledge worker to realize his potentialities. After reading this book, my motivaion to improve myself has been further enhanced. Indeed, KM is an essential strategy for supporting performance
You have got to be kidding?.......2007-07-20
I endeavor to follow the addage that if you have nothing nice to say then say nothing; however, this work is redundant, virtually devoid of any actionable insights, and smacks of a self indulgent attempt to justify his own ideosycratic work habits. I kept going in hopes that one concept would justify my investment of mind. The only return on my investment is a book I can now confindently refer to those I distain and assiduously warn those I adore to avoid.
I am fairly sure the majority of previous reviews are from nodes in his social network who have seized upon his scintilating suggestion that effective knowledge workers maintain and nuture their relationships by treating them well. It is sycophantic myopia when work which could and should be great barely achieves mediocracy receives any praise whatsoever.
If Mr. Davenport reads these words please know that I harbor no ill will to you personally I just found this particular publication of your work seriously wanting.
Insightful and pragmatic.......2007-05-26
Though he starts with a fuzzy definition of knowledge workers, Thomas Davenport quickly gets to the point where his ideas are both illuminating and practical. His logical structure covering multiple approaches to improving the performance of knowledge workers both changes some foundations upon which to approach the task and also provides many practical ideas to implement.
Having focussed for many years on process improvement in software projects, I found his insights on the difference betwen professional practice and process improvement very helpful. The discussion on information technology covered a range of tools, and included some inspiring examples. There is certainly another book or few just on this topic. Completing the books with the topic of managing knowledge workers at first appeared out of order, but upon a second reading the flow of his ideas started to make sense.
Overall, Thinking for a Living has been inspiring and useful. I would recommend it to anyone who manages knowledge workers, or aims to improve their performance. And as Mr. Davenport argues, that is an important aim for just about all companies in the rich countries.
Must-read if you have any Knowledge Workers in your company.......2006-11-09
Knowledge Workers are those people whose main professional output is Knowledge. Because all work requires some knowledge, the boundary can be arbitrary. So, depending on where you draw the line, Knowledge Workers represent ¼ to 1/3 of the labor force in the developed world. Doctors, lawyers, researchers, consultants, and computer programmers all share this trait.
We saw (in Corporate Longitude by Leif Edvinsson and Intangibles by Baruch Lev) that the market value of all publicly traded companies exceeded the market value of their tangible assets sometime in the early 90's. This gap has grown ever since. We assume that Knowledge accumulated inside a company is responsible for a good part of this difference. Ergo, our Knowledge Workers represent a very important, if mostly intangible, asset.
Because their main output is Knowledge, you can't quite measure what they are doing. If one of your best Knowledge Workers says she has her best ideas in the shower, you have no choice but to take her word for it. Knowledge Workers resist most controls on their quality and productivity. Sometimes this resistance is built into the rules of their professional associations (check out the rules and regulations of any legal or medical association and you'll witness this). Most Knowledge Workers hate bureaucracy and hierarchy. Some Knowledge Workers do not run on money: they prefer to be compensated with, for example, easier access to Knowledge.
Trouble is, our management models have changed little since the Industrial Revolution, so they're uniquely inadequate for managing Knowledge Workers. In fact, because the person who manages Knowledge Workers is in most cases a Knowledge Worker him/herself, this suggests that the ideal management model for Knowledge Workers must contain a "Player/Coach" flavor.
Enter Prof. Davenport, who has dedicated the past several years to the study of Knowledge Workers. This book distills most of what he has learned, and has a wealth of references to those who need more detail.
Knowledge Workers cannot easily be grouped into one category. One important lesson throughout the book is that, when coming to grips with the Knowledge Workers inside your company, you must segment them into different groups. After all, because Knowledge can be invented, discovered, packaged, distributed, or consumed, each Knowledge Worker you deal with will be active in one or more, but rarely all, of these activities. Prof Davenport proposes a basic taxonomy for this, with two dimensions: the level of interdependence among Knowledge Workers, and the level of Complexity of the work itself. This in turn spawns four basic models:
* Transaction Model (low interdependence, low complexity): The Knowledge Worker is essentially by him/herself and most of the situations he/she faces are repetitive. This is the only segment where "scripting" (ie, standard, pre-rehearsed speeches covering the most common situations) is effective. A good example of this is the 0800 customer-support people in a software company.
* Integration Model (high interdependence, low complexity): The task is repeatable but integration is critical, both intra-team and across disciplines. In this segment, the key is to establish tight process routines and standards. The best example of this is geologist/geophysicist/drilling engineer teams in oil&gas exploration.
* Expert Model (high complexity, low interdependence): Performance here is highly reliant on a person who contains most if not all the necessary Knowledge. Still, these people might profit from easy access to databases containing similar situations that took place in the past. Trial attorneys, systems analysts, and some types of medical doctors are excellent examples of this model.
* Collaboration Model (high complexity, high interdependence): People in these teams feel they're improvising all the time, when in fact there's an enormous degree of judgement in every decision made. This is the most difficult type of Knowledge-Worker team to improve in any organized way. Structured-deals teams in Investment Banks are probably the best example of this.
He is the first to admit that the above model is only a very basic first approach. When you do this in your company, you may find two or three of the above. Also, look out for hybrid situations. For example, a neurosurgeon fits the Expert model (without him, there's no surgery), but his supporting team (nurses, anesthesiologists, etc) fits the Collaboration model.
Prof. Davenport strongly encourages people to quickly move beyond the above models and develop their own Knowledge Worker segmentation models, and then to develop and use different management, performance-metrics, office-space, recruitment, remuneration, retention, succession, and IT-support strategies for each segment.
One set of research findings described in the book will not surprise most of us: business-process reengineering, a consulting buzzword in the past decade, has probably done more harm than good to the Knowledge Worker community.
The book also dispels some myths about Knowledge Workers with some hard research performed by Prof. Davenport and colleagues: for example, surprisingly few of them prefer to tele-commute (explanation: interaction among Knowledge Workers is critical to their success). Another interesting example is that they're not as much into electronic gadgets as we, coming from a geek stereotype, all thought.
Because it summarizes the author's past publications and research, the writing can be of variable quality, and progress from one chapter to the next is not exactly seamless, but neither of these foibles is enough to detract from the overall impact of a very timely and important book.
Some people may be offended by the summary at the end of each chapter; they didn't bother me, knowing there are so many print-challenged executives around us.
Highly recommended. Executive coaches dealing with technical teams may find this book invaluable.
Written by a manger for managers.......2006-09-10
I was able to go cover to cover in about 5 minutes. If you manage people that use their brains to do their work and you have no idea how to understand, manage and motivate them then this book might help you out a bit. I found it to be off-topic for me as I was hoping that it was going to be written for the people who Think for a Living rather than their managers.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Information Management Journal, published by Association of Records Managers & Administrators (ARMA) on July 1, 1999. The length of the article is 663 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know.(Review) (book review)
Author: Susan L. Cisco
Publication:
Information Management Journal (Refereed)
Date: July 1, 1999
Publisher: Association of Records Managers & Administrators (ARMA)
Volume: 33
Issue: 3
Page: 50
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Human Resource Planning, published by Human Resource Planning Society on December 1, 1998. The length of the article is 1028 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know.(Review)
Author: Paul R. Carlile
Publication:
Human Resource Planning (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 1998
Publisher: Human Resource Planning Society
Volume: 21
Issue: 4
Page: 58(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
The definitive primer on knowledge management, this book will establish the enduring vocabulary and concepts and serve as the hands on resource of choice for fast companies that recognize knowledge as the only sustainable source of competitive advantage. Drawing from their work with more than 30 knowledge-rich firms, the authors-experienced consultants with a track record of success-examine how all types of companies can effectively understand, analyze, measure, and manage their intellectual assets, turning corporate knowledge so that it can be easily leveraged throughout the firm, they caution readers about the limits of communications and information technology in managing intellectual capital. In the end, say the authors, the human qualities of knowledge-experience, intuition, and beliefs-are precisely the most valuable and most difficult to manage and maximize. Applying the insights and practices of Working Knowledge is every manager's first step on that rewarding road to long-term success.
Customer Reviews:
If you want to read only 1 book on the subject, try this one.......1999-01-07
It's there -- we just don't know where. That statement might well sum up the challenge currently facing many American corporations today, ones that haven't made it their practice to collect and codify the knowledge that exists within their corporate walls. So say former McKinsey researcher and University of Texas professor Thomas Davenport and consultant Laurence Prusak who have teamed up to write "Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What they Know" (Harvard Business School Press, 1998). Of the current spate of books on the subject, this one goes a long way in presenting the topic clearly, leaving theories, scenarios and pithy subtitles to the others. Instead, this book provides solid point-by-point definitions supported by anecdotal evidence. The authors take pains to explain their methodology, which in itself is fascinating. Davenport and Prusak note that specifically recognizing knowledge as a corporate asset is something new in today's ultra-competitive global environment. Well-versed in their subject, they take the time to educate the reader about the transfer of knowledge among individuals, how knowledge is generated and how best to map and evaluate different types of knowledge within an organization. Real world examples of true knowledge management systems are described. Companies like 3M, which in 1997 produced over 400 new products and have definitive knowledge management processes in place, are profiled. Despite their obvious bent toward imbuing corporate cultures with knowledge management processes, the authors also make note of the fact that "despite the corporate mantra that employee knowledge is a valuable resource, most firms do not make concerted efforts to cultivate the knowledge-oriented activities of their personnel." In trying to facilitate a move in this direction, they point to the creation of a new senior-level executive position, the Chief Knowledge Officer or CKO -- something more and more major corporations are beginning to incorporate into their organizational charts. Indeed, if you're a reader of the hippest hottest business magazine around today, Fast Company, you've no doubt already noticed this job title popping up around the country. The authors end the book by looking at corporate culture and the role it plays in facilitating true information sharing and ultimately knowledge management. Creating a knowledge-friendly culture is paramount, they say, to enabling people to feel free enough to share knowledge in any meaningful way. If you want to read only one book on this subject, try this one.
Average customer rating:
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Book Description
Essential reading for students and health professionals in medicine, nursing, public and community health, dentistry, pharmacy, and allied health sciences, A Study Guide to Epidemiology and Biostatistics contains clear and succinct explanations of complex topics. Each chapter contains two components: the study notes and the exercises. The study notes briefly explain the major issues of a given topic. The exercises component requires you to apply the knowledge gained from epidemiology examples. In addition, self-assessment quizzes are available on-line. Successfully used by thousands, it is the one and only comprehensive study guide that will expose you to all of the basic principles of epidemiology and biostatistics, help you understand biostatistics and epidemiology without becoming bogged down in mathematical computation, and enable you to intelligently read and appraise the health literature. It is a must-have resource for those who will become users of epidemiological reports.
Customer Reviews:
Best study guide ever........2003-09-11
Well, Helena Curtus's Biology text has always been my favorite one. With this study guide, it become even better. This guide will guide you to find out which subject or fact that you should know or learn step by step. Just following this study guide as you read the text, you will be able to sort through the tons of information the jewel of biology.
Don't hesitate and go buy both text and study guide while they are still available.
Books:
- Advanced Planning and Scheduling Solutions in Process Industry (GOR-Publications)
- Adversity Quotient @ Work: Make Everyday Challenges the Key to Your Success--Putting the Principles of AQ Into Action
- Altruistically Inclined?: The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity (Economics, Cognition, and Society)
- Antitrust and Regulation During World War 1 and the Republican Era, 1917-1932 (Business and Government in America Since 1870, Vol 4)
- Art of Smooth Pasting (Fundamentals of Pure and Applied Economics)
- Beyond Globalization: Shaping a Sustainable Global Economy
- Brother Can You Spare A Dime? : The Great Depression, 1929-1933
- Capstone: Exemplary Lessons for High School Economics: Teacher's Guide/student activities set
- Challenges to Research Universities
- China's Entry Into the World Trade Organization (Routledge Studies in the Growth Economies of Asia)
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