Smart Business: How Knowledge Communities Can Revolutionize Your Company - Hardcover

Botkin, Jim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684850249 ISBN 13: 9780684850245

Publisher: Free Press, 1999

Synopsis

An essential resource for businesses looking to thrive in the Information Age, where knowledge is the prime resource, shows how sharing and effectively using knowledge can be the key to success and can radically change the way business is done. 17,500 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Jim Botkin, co-author of Monster Under the Bed and author of No Limits to Learning, is the founder and President of Interclass, the International Learning Association. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

Botkin is cofounder and president of the International Corporate Learning Association (InterClass), a "knowledge community" of Fortune 500 companies. He has been writing about learning and knowledge for more than 20 years, most recently coauthoring The Monster under the Bed: How Business Is Mastering the Opportunity of Knowledge and Profit with Stanley Davis. Here Botkin shows how knowledge communities are supplanting teams as building blocks for "organizations focused more on networks than on traditional hierarchies." A knowledge community is a group of managers and workers "whose mission is to create, use, and apply the new knowledge in their industry for tangible business purposes." Botkin shows how companies within InterClass have utilized knowledge communities, and he explains how they can be applied to enhance the products a company makes, to organize and manage companies better, and to understand and improve their cultures, learning, and leadership. David Rouse

Botkin, founder and president of the International Corporate Learning Association, focuses on the challenges organizations face, the questions they should answer, and the basic facts they should recognize as they make the transition from informal communities of practice to formal knowledge communities. Challenges include a fear of cannibalizing existing products or services, the diluted power of "old-timers" in the hierarchy, and the alarming regularity with which industrial leaders follow their core technologies into obsolescence and obscurity. Botkin identifies key changes: the switch from computers as number crunchers to computers as connectors, the emergence of the Internet, and the need to value people over technology. He includes examples from the experiences of Xerox, Marriott International, Saturn Corporation, Sweden Post, Motorola, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Essential for all library staff, supervisors, and directors, this is recommended for academic, public, and special libraries.ANorman B. Hutcherson, Beale Memorial Lib., Bakersfield, CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684850249
• ISBN 13: 9780684850245
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304