H. James Wilson

Thomas H. Davenport

Laurence Prusak

Professor Department of Management Information School of Management Thomas H Davenport

Explores where new ideas come from, how to evaluate which ideas are worth pursuing, and how to customize ideas to suit and organization's unique needs.

Creating and Capitalizing on the Best Management Thinking

What's the Big Idea?

Matthew Kohut

Edward J. Hoffman

Why human skills and expertise, not technical tools, are what make projects succeed. The project is the basic unit of work in many industries. Software applications, antiviral vaccines, launch-ready spacecraft: all were produced by a team and managed as a project. Project management emphasizes control, processes, and tools—but, according to The Smart Mission, that is not the right way to run a project. Human skills and expertise, not technical tools, are what make projects successful. Projects run on knowledge. This paradigm-shifting book—by three project management experts, all of whom have decades of experience at NASA and elsewhere—challenges the conventional wisdom on project management, focusing on the human dimension: learning, collaboration, teaming, communication, and culture. The authors emphasize three themes: projects are fundamentally about how teams work and learn together to get things done; the local level—not an organization’s upper levels—is where the action happens; and projects don’t operate in a vacuum but exist within organizations that are responsible to stakeholders. Drawing on examples and case studies from NASA and other organizations, the authors identify three project models—micro, macro, and global—and their different knowledge needs. Successful organizations have a knowledge-based culture. Successful project management guides the interplay of knowledge, projects, and people.

NASA’s Lessons for Managing Knowledge, People, and Projects

The Smart Mission

Stephen Denning

John Seely Brown

Katalina Groh

This book is the story of how four busy executives, from different backgrounds and different perspectives, were surprised to find themselves converging on the idea of narrative as an extraordinarily valuable lens for understanding and managing organizations in the twenty-first century. The idea that narrative and storytelling could be so powerful a tool in the world of organizations was initially counter-intuitive. But in their own words, John Seely Brown, Steve Denning, Katalina Groh, and Larry Prusak describe how they came to see the power of narrative and storytelling in their own experience working on knowledge management, change management, and innovation strategies in organizations such as Xerox, the World Bank, and IBM. Storytelling in Organizations lays out for the first time why narrative and storytelling should be part of the mainstream of organizational and management thinking. This case has not been made before. The tone of the book is also unique. The engagingly personal and idiosyncratic tone comes from a set of presentations made at a Smithsonian symposium on storytelling in April 2001. Reading it is as stimulating as spending an evening with Larry Prusak or John Seely Brown. The prose is probing, playful, provocative, insightful and sometime profound. It combines the liveliness and freshness of spoken English with the legibility of a ready-friendly text. Interviews will all the authors done in 2004 add a new dimension to the material, allowing the authors to reflect on their ideas and clarify points or highlight ideas that may have changed or deepened over time.

Storytelling in Organizations

Don Cohen

Publisher Fact Sheet Examines the nature of human interaction within organizations & identifies social capital as a means of breeding employee satisfaction & economic gain.

How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work

In Good Company

This influential book establishes the enduring vocabulary and concepts in the burgeoning field of knowledge management. It serves as the hands-on resource of choice for companies that recognize knowledge as the only sustainable source of competitive advantage going forward. Drawing from their work with more than thirty knowledge-rich firms, Davenport and Prusak--experienced consultants with a track record of success--examine how all types of companies can effectively understand, analyze, measure, and manage their intellectual assets, turning corporate wisdom into market value. They categorize knowledge work into four sequential activities--accessing, generating, embedding, and transferring--and look at the key skills, techniques, and processes of each. While they present a practical approach to cataloging and storing knowledge so that employees can easily leverage it throughout the firm, the authors caution readers on the limits of communications and information technology in managing intellectual capital.

Laurence Prusak

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