Book Review: The Fifth Discipline

This time I had in my reading list one of the business literature classics The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter Senge. It's a book that introduces systems thinking as we know it know.

Book is well written, but even more importantly the contents of it are really valuable. I had read about systems thinking before and I had been given so many recommendations about this book, that I had high hopes for the book. Luckily it matched my expectations.

The idea of the book is that organizations should become learning organizations to stay in business and have a good future. The book introduced a fresh way of seeing organizations as whole systems. It gives lot of value to personal development and human values ensuring that organizations learn to improve themselves in the long run.

Book introduces five disciplines of learning organization. Also it introduces eleven learning disabilities that prevents learning organizations to form. It has a lot good examples and it is easy to learn with this book.

I highly recommend this book to everyone working in organizations, small or big ones. So this would be a good book for almost anyone. It's a bit longish with over 400 pages. That's a pity, since it might scare few potential readers away from it.

It's great and important book. Many people have read it, but still only few organizations live to the values of the book. Learning needs understanding. Hopefully many more will read the book, understand the teachings and share the knowledge.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

No one is irreplaceable because of their knowledge

There are people in organizations that seem irreplaceable. Of course no one is really irreplaceable, but they can be important for organization to keep running efficiently. The fun thing is that often it is thought that these irreplaceable people are so knowledgeable about some subjects that it makes them so important. But that's not the case.

In information age, knowledge is available for everyone. Information about basically any subject is only few googles away. The same is true with organizations, information is available for most who are eager enough to find it.

The true value of the people is how they use and process the information they receive. Mapping information together and ignoring irrelevant information are highly necessary skills of todays organizations. Reacting to correct information and knowing how and with whom to process the information is the key what makes some people so effective.

People should concentrate more on putting information and sources of information to the context than trying to gain information to themselves whenever they can. I bet everyone knows these people who try to be involved in everything, but they don't actually give any valuable input to anything. Then at the same time, there can be people who are not involved in many things, but once asked they somehow always seem to give valuable input.

Information about where and how to find information, is more important than knowing yourself. That's what irreplaceable people are made of.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review - The New Edge in Knowledge

I read The New Edge in Knowledge: How Knowledge Management Is Changing the Way We Do Business. This was a book I purchased to understand knowledge management possibilities in our client companies. So it was purely out of professional interest about the subject.

After reading the book, knowledge management feels more of a bureaucratic nonsense than it did before the book. It introduced knowledge management to require lot of efforts and big organization to get it working. I just have to disagree with that.

Big part of the book was explaining the obvious of knowledge management. There wasn't really anything innovative presented for knowledge management, tools and processes were common and common sense.

Examples presented in the book was from big companies, I don't consider really leading edge of any sort. Those were big successfull companies, which I believe have all the methodologies of the world in use and succeed despite those. I didn't find any actual proof, that knowledge management would have really made these companies special.

I do believe knowledge management and learning organizations are important. I disagree the bureaucratic, comprehensive programs build to increase knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing comes from open atmosphere and good enough tools for it.

As a final touch, style of the book couldn't be considered as exhilarating or inspiring. It could have easily been 50 pages shorter than it was. I can't really recommend it to anyone. There must be better books for knowledge management.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen