Not about knowledge management, but … It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry hysterically while reading this devastating analysis of management consulting by two editors of The Economist, but it should be required reading for all managers who are thinking of buying consulting services — for knowledge management or any other reason.

Whether you agree with them or not (and even the editors of Knowledge Praxis are not in complete agreement), this is the book everyone is reading and citing. The authors are thorough, and they expend three full, well-researched chapters distinguishing Eastern and Western perceptions of knowledge. Yep, we’re guilty of being Cartesian dualists when it comes to knowledge. We’ll have to live with that shame. But does it really matter? Nonaka and Takeuchi’s insights are useful, but we’re not sure whether Japanese organizational culture can be transplanted here, and they really miss the boat by ignoring the impact of information technology on organizational knowledge resources. Nevertheless, several major corporations and consulting organizations look at this work as their "bible" for knowledge management strategy and implementation.

Hamel and Prahalad call for a complete overhaul of the ways in which firms do strategic planning. They focus on the skills, or "core competences," within an organization rather than its business units or products as the key to success. Hamel and Prahalad, who, by the way, are among the most successful business strategists working today, encourage firms to abandon traditional, short-term, competitive strategies in favor of a focused, disciplined, long-term vision that will create new opportunities and markets. They cite the success of such firms as Motorola, Chrysler, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart, whose product successes exemplify a rethinking of organizational strategy.

Hedlund and Nonaka present a framework for discussing knowledge management that extends the work of Galbraith, Arrow, Simon, and others in the field of management and organizational theory. They point out that creating and exploiting knowledge within an organization revolves around the interaction of tacit and explicit knowledge and the "transfer and transformation of knowledge between individuals, organizational units, and the surrounding environment." They provide a conceptual framework that looks at different aspects of knowledge management and demonstrate its use in a model that contrasts U.S. and Japanese practices of managing knowledge. Hedlund and Nonaka argue that the characteristics of knowledge management have serious implications for the types of activities (including innovations and strategies) in which a firm or organization is likely to succeed. They reinforce the important idea that not only the success but also the very survival of organizations will depend, in large part, on how well they create, transfer, and exploit their knowledge resources.

Earl provides an assessment of knowledge, its value, and knowledge work through case studies of Skandia International and Shorko Films, two firms that were among the first to institute knowledge management. He makes the case for "knowledge as strategy," focusing on the value of information technologies in exploiting organizational knowledge. Earl classifies information systems from the perspective of knowledge and uses the case studies to develop a model for managing knowledge as a strategic resource. He concludes that any knowledge-based strategy requires a combination of organizational and technological capabilities, as evidenced by Skandia and Shorko, which he considers prototypes of successful firms in a knowledge economy.

Huber reviews four constructs linked to organizational learning: knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, and organizational memory. He analyzes and critiques the extant literature related to each, noting a lack of cumulative work and synthesis among different research groups. Although now seven years old, this article is still tremendously useful as a literature review and history. Huber pulls together various theoretical perspectives that have contributed to our understanding of how organizations learn and what constitutes organizational knowledge, developing a "big picture" overview of the importance of learning to knowledge management.