Editor's letter

Knowledge economy

Thanks for this issue goes first to two of our field’s iconic pioneers, Charles Savage in Germany and Richard Cross in the UK, who have helped me feature an in-depth series of reports on the knowledge economy. Charles, whose leadership in the knowledge era goes back decades, reaches back centuries to explain the knowledge economy as a natural phenomenon that is not engineered, contrived nor controlled. He says the economy is a living process and – with his penchant to turn nouns into verbs – labels what’s happening as an ‘(ac)knowledging’ economy, a new compass acknowledging a new playing field. The field is comprised of phenomenal fast-paced changes in commerce that leaves industrial age management outmoded, no longer a fit for modern times. The impact is more than changes in the economic order but rather the social and political order of the world and everyone in it. Richard Cross affirms that today’s world is not grandfather’s baby with a report on the global economies of the UK and Europe gleaned from a recent conference in London featuring bellwether thought and policy leaders in business and government that leaves no doubt – Europe is in the game. We finish it off in the Knowledgeworks column by describing the giant leap South Korea has made from agrarian to industrial to knowledge economy in just 30 years – short by comparison to the 150 years it took the Western world. The tiny peninsula of South Korea is truly the tip of Asia’s huge potential in the knowledge age. And, then there’s the US – crying over spilt milk as the economy goes global and Americans browbeat their political leaders into backtracking on the North American Free Trade Agreement in order to ‘save’ their old industrial era jobs. Above all, the new economy is a world without walls regardless of social or political fears or judgments. Bottom line, he who ignores facts, fails. In other areas Nick Milton returns with a masterclass on knowledge maturity models. He shows us how knowledge evolves, which fits nicely into our thinking on the knowledge economy. He begins with two of the most valuable truths: 1) you don’t need to manage all your knowledge; and, 2) you will need to focus on the high-value, critical knowledge to gain the biggest return. And don’t miss a couple of newcomers we’ve ‘outsourced’ – thought leader Marsha Egan on e-mail management and American-in-Asia Harry Greene, an internationally known management thought leader who says industrial age leaders didn’t have IT to manage business so they managed the organisation. Result-performance Management (R-pM) changes that. Enjoy.

Jerry Ash Editor

Features

Weaving the magic carpet This article is for subscribers only
One of KM’s earliest pioneers has always focused on the coming of a knowledge economy and now leads the transition. But to explain the dynamics of the current change, he reaches back for lessons learnt in the earlier transition and proposes threads of KM and more woven together to make a magic carpet on which to fly into the (ac)knowledging economy.

Regulars

The Knowledge - Brook Manville Free
A short paragraph giving an author credit rarely tells enough. So it was in the March issue of Inside Knowledge where Brook Manville provided an inspiring cover story on the role of KM in righting the course of the United Way of America, just one chapter in the career of this author/expert who began as one of the world’s early and most accomplished KM pioneers.

The key(words) to success Free
Advance planning for website metrics helps you avoid having to puzzle over the results later on.

Book review Free
The Pfeiffer Book of Successful Communication
Skill-building Tools
Editor: Jack Gordon
Publisher: Pfeiffer
ISBN: 0-978-0-4701-8180-5
Publication date: October 2007

The Gurteen perspective: Ducks in a row Free
I RECENTLY READ a blog post on the web where someone proposed selling blogging to senior management by explaining how weblogs improved conversations. I wasn’t at all convinced this had much chance of success.

Thought leader Free
E-mail overload: Treat the problem, not the symptom
THERE IS SOMETHING better than no e-mail Fridays and e-mail bankruptcy. Both are attempted solutions for businesses and individuals to deal with the increasing overload and overwhelm due to the ever-accelerating amount of e-mail received. And in my view, both are classic cases of addressing the symptom rather than the problem.