Far Wise in Knowledge Management

Choices

One thing I learned and believe personally is that one always has a choice. A choice about what to do or not, how to react. We make a choice, deliberate or not. We choose how we spend our time, what we say or when we say nothing. Maybe we're not alway in control of the situation, but how we react to it is our choice. I realized this when I was layed off at BlackBerry and went to several workshops offered to the old employees looking for work. Some attendees were angry, many were sour and others still lived in the "old days". Yes, I was mad and disappointed too, but I had soon left that behind me (or at least, I tried to). I went to the workshops because I wanted to move on and not be reminded of what once was... That's when I realized I had made the choice to look at the future, as well as that I didn't want to talk about all the things that had happened, I wanted to stay positive. It's not always easy, especially in hard time and when people around you keep talking about thing that I wanted to leave behind (like what happened in the workshops). Realizing that I made the choice, helped me, at that time and later as well.

Find Your Why - Simon Sinek

I don't know if Simon Sinek needs an introduction. Many people have seen his TED Talk and read his book "Start with why". His Golden Circle inspired many people to find the reason for what they do, instead of focusing on the what and how (which is easier, of course). Apparently it's not so easy to find this "Why", so now there is the practical guide book "Find your why" that Sinek wrote with David Mead and Peter Docker. I recently read this new book and will discuss it here.

The book starts with a refresher of the first book, so if you have that still clear, you can skip this chapter. Then there are two directions: the discovery process for individuals and for teams (and organizations). If you're only interested in one of the two, you can skip the other part. The generic steps aren't very hard and look straightforward.

Knowledge-Centered Service, a knowledge management method

When I worked at BlackBerry, we had a (small) knowledge management community and each member presented what she or he worked on. One presentation, from the guy who was Program Manager at Customer Support, presented about Knowedge-Centered Support (now renamed to Knowledge-Centered Service) or KCS. I was surprised that I had never heard about this KM method before. My colleague was very enthousiastic about this method, which aims at service organizations (like his Customer Support department). Perhaps this method is more known in North-America, where it started. As KCS is now becoming part of my working life, I want to explain a bit more about this method. Of course I can't cover all details, but there are many open resources on the web.

Passion is overrated

Samuel's post about following one's passion caught my attention. I fully agree that sometimes work needs to get done, which has nothing to do with passion. I once heard someone saying that if everybody followed their passion, there would be no garbage men (or women). We can't all be musician, athlete, painter, however passionate we are. Maybe one's passion is not in the daily job, but this job provides the money to do something you like to do (but in which  you're just not good enough to make it a living).

If I may quote Scott Adams, "Passion at work is overrated". I like Ben Horowitz' advice much better: Don't follow your passion, follow your contribution. I think that's what we all can do (and what Samuel did with his documents).

 

 

 

 

 

Trends in management books

Last week I wrote a blog post for the Managementboek.nl site, on behalf of the Jury for Management Book of 2018 (#Mgtboek2018) (in Dutch). The intention is that we are going to do more promotion about the work of the Jury. In the first jury post, chair, woman Danielle wrote about how we deal with the first big selection of books that we received. I posted about it here myself. We agreed that I would write the next post and, with input from the other jury members, the topic is the trends that we see in all the books in our reading pile.

 As reviewer I usually read books in the same category, so I find it interesting to read books that are not in my area of specialism. I'm glad that the jury is composed with a mix of specialists. Most of the times a book is read by a specialist, but also a non-specialist, as a management book should be readable by a broader group than specialists.

By reading this broader selection of books, it also becomes more obvious which themes occur frequently. Some are not new, like customer value creation, Lean, leadership (in the broad sense) and organizational change. For these topics, we look if the author has a new, original viewpoint. There are many books that look into the future. New developments, not only technological, tell us where we are heading as society. Topics are (amongst others): robots, sharing economy, blockchain. What does it mean to us, to the way we work, we think about products? Those are interesting questions. Because the topics are new and uncertain, the jury is interested to see if the book is more than just thoughts and predictions: is there a practical element that managers can use?

Talking about practicality, the use of a form of "canvas" seems to be very popular. It started with the Business Model Canvas, which gives a good overview of a  realitively complex topic as a business model. We see many copies, some of which are more succesful than others.

 These are only few of the topics that the jury finds in the books (and we're only half way reading, as the year 2017 is not over yet and many more books may be published). We hope to be surprised by a large variation of other topics!