Knowledge Management

Updated, this new edition draws on two trillion-dollar examples one being the present credit crunch to highlight the gaping hole in the way industry and commerce are being taught how to make their decisions. The oversight is experiential learning, the ability to benefit from prior practice. As it s taught and used today, only current practice is typically drawn upon, and then only informally, defensively, and inexpertly. Where the discipline is short-changing management is in the application of institution-specific previous practice, the type of experience that walks out of the front door as organizations (and workers) make the most of so-called flexible working. Couple this with the short, selective and defensive memories of the few employees that don t go walkabout, and this explains the repeated mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons that litter modern industry and commerce. In many cases organizations find it difficult to even learn from their successes. The phenomenon is called corporate amnesia, the upshot of which is graphically illustrated by the dialogue in one of English novelist J. L. Carr s texts: You have not had thirty years experience. You have had one year s experience 30 times. By combining best practice in two under-exploited and, puzzlingly, disconnected disciplines unfashionable corporate/business history and Cinderella knowledge management - this book explains how organizations can formulate a distinctive lessons learned approach that can be passed down organizations short-lived generations of employees. By adapting to the modern workplace Professor David Kolb s acknowledged reflective methodology, Experience Based Management s approach can take decision making out of the land of practiced guesswork - and help to banish the deafening chorus from management that hindsight is a wonderful thing. Experiential non-learning is unnecessarily expensive, very expensive. Experiential learning is all about how to benefit from not forgetting. It is a more professional way of making decisions.

Arnold Kransdorff was the first to identify the phenomenon of corporate amnesia in the early 1980s, soon after the flexible labor market started to make a significant impact on jobs tenure. His first book on the subject ( Corporate Amnesia , Butterworth Heinemann, 1998) was short listed for the UK s Management Book of the Year in 1999 and selected as one of 800 titles worldwide to launch Microsoft Reader eBooks program in 2000.