knowledge management

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The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today’s emerging networked information environment. In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing—and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained—or lost—by the decisions we make today.

We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business

Wikinomics and The Wisdom of Crowds identified the phenomena of emerging social networks, but they do not confront how businesses can profit from the wisdom of crowds. WE ARE SMARTER THAN ME by Barry Libert and Jon Spector, Foreword by Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, is the first book to show anyone in business how to profit from the wisdom of crowds. Drawing on their own research and the insights from an enormous community of more than 4,000 people, Barry Libert and Jon Spector have written a book that reveals what works, and what doesn’t, when you are building community into your decision making and business processes. In We Are Smarter Than Me, you will discover exactly how to use social networking and community in your business, driving better decision-making and greater profitability. The book shares powerful insights and new case studies from product development, manufacturing, marketing, customer service, finance, management, and beyond. You’ll learn which business functions can best be accomplished or supported by communities; how to provide effective moderation, balance structure with independence, manage risk, define success, implement effective metrics, and much more. From tools and processes to culture and leadership, We Are Smarter than Me will help you transform the promise of social networking into a profitable reality.

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

Presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the net – presentationzen.com – shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making “slide presentations” in today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.

The Craftsman

Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world. The Craftsman engages the many dimensions of skill—from the technical demands to the obsessive energy required to do good work. Craftsmanship leads Sennett across time and space, from ancient Roman brickmakers to Renaissance goldsmiths to the printing presses of Enlightenment Paris and the factories of industrial London; in the modern world he explores what experiences of good work are shared by computer programmers, nurses and doctors, musicians, glassblowers, and cooks. Unique in the scope of his thinking, Sennett expands previous notions of crafts and craftsmen and apprises us of the surprising extent to which we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things.

Five Minds for the Future

We live in a time of vast changes. And those changes call for entirely new ways of learning and thinking. In Five Minds for the Future: Howard Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead: the disciplinary mind—mastery of major schools of thought (including science, mathematics, and history) and of at least one professional craft; the synthesizing mind—ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others; the creating mind—capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions, and phenomena; the respectful mind—awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups; the ethical mind—fulfillment of one’s responsibilities as a worker and citizen. World-renowned for his theory of multiple intelligences, Gardner takes that thinking to the next level in this book, drawing from a wealth of diverse examples to illuminate his ideas. Concise and engaging, Five Minds for the Future will inspire lifelong learning in any reader as well as provide valuable insights for those charged with training and developing organizational leaders—both today and tomorrow.

Active Knowledge Modeling of Enterprises

Enterprise Modeling has been defined as the art of externalizing enterprise knowledge, i.e., representing the core knowledge of the enterprise. Although useful in product design and systems development, for modeling and model-based approaches to have a more profound effect, a shift in modeling approaches and methodologies is necessary. Modeling should become as natural as drawing, sketching and scribbling, and should provide powerful services for capturing work-centric, work-supporting and generative knowledge, for preserving context and ensuring reuse. A solution is the application of Active Knowledge Modeling (AKM). The AKM technology is about discovering, externalizing, expressing, representing, sharing, exploring, configuring, activating, growing and managing enterprise knowledge. An AKM solution is about exploiting the Web as a knowledge engineering medium, and developing knowledge-model-based families of platforms, model-configured workplaces and services. This book was written by the inventors of AKM arising out of their cooperation with both scientists and industrial practitioners over a long period of time, and the authors give examples, directions, methods and services to enable new ways of working, exploiting the AKM approach to enable effective c-business, enterprise design and development, and lifecycle management. Industry managers and design engineers will become aware of the manifold possibilities of, and added values in, IT-supported distributed design processes, and researchers for collaborative design environments will find lots of stimulation and many examples for future developments.