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

Book review: What matters now by Gary Hamel

Gary Hamel is one of the most influential business thinkers nowadays. He has lot of things to tell in his latest book What matters now. It's a book about innovation, management innovation and how to make a world a better place. So it's a book about many thoughts, that come together in Gary's mind.

I finished the book about a week ago and I'm still bit puzzled, what it was all about. There was so many good things presented there and so many good examples around the world, that it takes time to digest it. Maybe the main message there is, that management practices in use are old and these don't help to get the full potential out of the people in companies.

Gary Hamel has found really interesting examples from very different kind of organizations all around the world to demonstrate how management and organizational behaviour can change. There are organizations from churches to small and huge companies in very different industries presented. The main similarity between examples is, that there has been in these organizations few people who have wanted to make a change in how their organization operate.

The book was really interesting and inspiring. It raised a lot of questions and gave some answers. It brought lot of seeds for ideas, but left also many questions to wonder. It was easy to read, but hard to digest.

I really like the way Gary Hamel writes. It's always interesting and easy to read, whatever the subject is. I recommend it for everyone interested in organizational improvement and new management practices. It's an important book which raises questions and thoughts. It's a pleasure to read.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review - The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen

The Innovator's Dilemma has been stated to be business literature classic. Book by Clayton M. Christensen has been quoted in many books I have read and I wanted to know what it is all about.

Innovator's Dilemma as a title is bit misleading. Book is really about organizations and technology change and development. In there is the problem called Innovator's Dilemma, but for me at least it was a bit of surprise. I had thought book would tell more about innovation as individuals, but it is all about organizational abilities to adapt to innovation.

Book is thorough. It really tells the history of couple of industries and dives in to the root causes of the problems. I appreciate that it is based on facts, but I would have not needed to know those in such a detail level. It is more of a school book than a self learning book.

Nevertheless the criticism about writing style and readability, book contents are great. It really explains well why same organizations that prosper in sustaining technologies can't keep up with disruptive technologies. There's lot of excellent and interesting insights that really helps understanding organizations and businesses better.

It's a controversial book in that sense. It's a book I'm really happy I did read, but on the other had, it was quite boring to read time to time. I would love that someone would have taken this book to 2010 and written it in more interesting way.

This is a must read for anyone making business and organizational decisions in large scale. I bet they all know the book, but somehow the same things happen all the time. New small companies come in and steal the market from the old players. This book explains why.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Forbidding email is not a solution*

There's been news flying around that some companies are abandoning email. Atos Origin for example is going so far that they are forbidding email totally according to Computer world. I've seen many similar news from other sources also, claiming that big bunch of emails are waste. I have to say I second that, majority of emails are waste. There's no question about that. What's worrying me, is the proposed solution to that problem.

In organizations, there's natural demand to communicate clearly to large groups. Often the sender of the message can't be sure whom all would benefit from the information in the message. This causes, that many of the emails have receivers who are not interested about the subject. This then starts to cumulate, when people in the mail chain start to answer and will not drop anyone out from the mail chain, due to they are not sure why the people was there in the first place. From both of these, there comes the waste.

Solution for the waste problem doesn't go away with new tools like social networks, intranet feeds, wiki's and instant messaging chats although the problem does change a bit with these tools. With these people need to themselves tune in to the forums they think are relevant for them. This will cause at the end that people are tuning in to all news sources they think might be relevant for them. This then will cause the same information overflow as with email quite soon. And at the end it might be, that people will use even more time with these new tools than used with traditional email for example.

Don't get me wrong, these new tools, IM, Social Networks, Wiki's and whatever are really essential for any company to communicate better. These just will never replace email. There is a need and place for all of these. Problem isn't in any of the tools, but with the people using those. With short and effective trainings, people would learn to use right tools for right communication. There are always subjects that go best with email or social networks and subjects that require more rapid feedback either face to face or with IM.

Also there's the second thing. Tools rarely work when forced. Tools which are irrelevant will die away when there are better ones available. Tools that add value, will find the way to be used. For example forbidding the use of email, will make people angry and frustrated. Offering better tools for communication and letting people to find the benefits themselves, will cut some of the email communication automatically.

The real problem with communication, isn't in any of the tools. Noise is the real problem, not email or any other tool. Learning to cope with noise is a skill that should be taught and learned in all organizations. It's a new skill in a history of mankind, but it's a really important skill for the knowledge workers of today. And noise isn't going away anytime soon, but it will keep increasing, because sharing information is getting easier all the time.

Solution to noise is always changing the behavior of the people, not changing the tools. Offering new tools and ways to use old tools can help with noise, but only if person understands and agrees that noise exists. In modern organizations everyone should learn to cope with noise and at some point also to reduce the noise they are making. And at the end, even noise isn't the real problem, it's the lack of skill to cope with it.

* Title was changed from "Don't blame email for the noise" to the current 1.12.2011

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book I read - The Toyota Way

Mainly because of interest to Agile SW development and Lean thinking, I read The Toyota Way -14 management principles from the world's greatest manufacturer from Jeffrey K. Liker. Like it says, it's a book about Toyota much praised manufacturing system.

Whole idea behind the book is to give an better view what makes Toyota manufacturing system such a good one. It introduces TPS (Toyota Production System), Kanban and lots of other systems they use.Still most importantly it tells about the importance of company culture, continuous learning and true understanding about the thinking behind TPS.

I've always been a big fan of thinking, "understand before you act" and that seems to be one of the key principles in Toyota also. Almost everywhere in this book it comes obvious that thorough understanding is the key to success. Hiding true problems behind quick win fixes is not profitable in the long run.

I really liked the book. It opens quite well the thinking behind TPS and the culture what they have there in Toyota. Of course it's just a tip of iceberg you understand based on one book, but at least I think it's the right ice berg to understand. Just trying to learn Kanban and Lean by how others are doing it, easily misses lot of very important aspects of the whole methodology.

I would recommend this book to all of you interested about Lean or TPS. Also those of you who see it beneficial to understand different kind companies, business models, manufacturing and company culture's.

The only small recommendation I would like to give to Dr Liker is, that maybe in the next edition there could be glossary, since there's so many terms flying around all the time, it's sometimes bit tricky to keep on track of all those.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen