Information has its greatest value when it is most available to, and accessible by, people for immediate use in understanding their world. I not only believe this, I put this insight to work in my consulting and teaching. To implement this, I often use stories from the headlines to illustrate my key points. There are […]
Knowledge Management would be better off as a discipline if it leaned into the management side more, and relied a little less exclusively on the knowledge side. It’s possible to read articles or even whole books on KM and find little discussion specifying the knowledge that people use, specifically how they use it in producing […]
The other day I received an email from “Susan”, an alumna of the Columbia IKNS program whom I had the good fortune to work with as one of my students there. Susan’s question to me was on research, which that program touches upon but doesn’t cover in great depth, and in which I have lots […]
Most of us work in virtual meetings often, some of us almost exclusively. People call in using Google Hangouts, Skype, GoToMeeting, WebEx, JoinMe, Free Conference, and so on. (I’m speaking here of “virtual meetings for the rest of us,” not the high-end meeting rooms costing hundreds of thousands.) The hybrid meeting I’ve been part of […]
I used our recent office relocation to review some files I had not visited in a while. Though an arduous undertaking, it provided some surprising rewards. Among other things, I came across one of my first major projects, done with the great firm of Peat, Marwick, Mitchell — which soon after became KPMG. Out client […]
A few weeks ago I attended a reunion at my alma mater, Yale University. As they always do, Yale offered up some of its most articulate faculty and administrators to describe the current state of affairs at the University. The array of talent, initiative, and innovation on display was dazzling. By the end of the […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
I read the following headline recently in the Wall Street Journal: “Consumers crave [PRODUCT], but [PRODUCERS] enjoying their best profits ever are reluctant to switch.” (The words I’ve bolded here were specified in the article, but I’ll get to that in a minute.) Headlines reminiscent of this have been written many times in business history. […]
It makes my day when I am asked a question I can’t answer completely and easily. The students in Columbia’s Information and Knowledge Strategy program rarely fail to disappoint in this regard. Where do KPIs come from? One IKNS student has been using the KVC framework in her “day job” to design program evaluations for […]
This spring has been uncommonly busy, and I regret that has caused me to slip a couple of self-imposed deadlines here. Here’s what we’ve been up to. Blended Value I continued to work with TKA Director and branding expert Jay Gronlund on our Blended Value initiative — which seeks to redefine strategic enterprise goals beyond […]
I was recently asked to keynote a conference on Turning Knowledge Into Value, funded by the European Union. That’s something I care deeply about, and I am greatly honored to have been asked. I have been head-down on that, and will share with you at least a top-line on what I’ve come up with. I […]
That was the title of a talk I gave recently to a group of graduate students at the Palmer School of Library and Information Science. It may have seemed that I was just trying to be provocative — but in fact, I was genuinely interested in finding the answer. I think I now finally have. […]
We recently had a discussion at Columbia’s Information and Knowledge Strategy program about consolidating, or at least coordinating, the various analytic frameworks that many of the faculty use in their work and teaching. The consensus seemed to revolve around the idea that there is an optimal number of frameworks — that while too few leaves […]