This month's theme-based community is tackling the issue about the Winning Strategies in Knowledge-based Economies.
The second week discussion focused on the The Role of Strategy in Business Transformation.

1. Quote of the week:
"The new management imperative, is to abandon assumptions of stability and control, to accept the reality of constant change, and to build the capacity to respond." by Christopher Meyer in "It's Alive"

2. More Comments to the Questions and Answers - Session with Christopher Meyer
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS: Michele Gorgoglione, 12th May 2003, Management models and decentralization to developing countries.
I haven't read your book yet, but I suppose that your argument is not bounded to Western countries and considers globalisation and the dynamics of developing countries. This is particularly relevant for Western companies which have decentralized their production models (or are facing this decision right now), bringing manufacturing to under-developed countries and keeping knowledge-intensive functions in house: will this model last? And what will be the management models in those developing countries: will they imitate past Western models, looking for stability and control, or will they take some "adaptive management framework"?

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS: Atai Ziv, 12th May 2003, Effect of the "coming molecu-lar economy"
What is the effect of the "coming molecular economy" on business development (Networking) and strategy formation process? What is the future management role?

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS: Claudio Garavelli, 12th May 2003, A radically new ap-proach or a modern reality simplification?
I like the biological analogy with management. My research group has been using genetic algorithms and neural networks to define decision support systems for quite a long time now. However, I have some doubts about the real impact of new management approaches and their actual "revolution". [...] My impression is that in most organizations people just continue to focus to ancient paradigms, such as finding/creating new customers? needs, optimising process performance, and fostering new product development, despite any ap-parently challenging way of interpreting competition and reality. [...] Do you think the "molecular" or "biological" approach could lead to radically modify the way we perceive and operate business management, or will it be just another (modern) way to simplify the representation of a complex reality? (maybe simplifications are somehow necessary to let "ordinary" people manage complex organizations and environments?)

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS: Chris Meyer - May 13th 2003, The future of centralization.
As change accelerates, keeping widely dispersed activities in synch gets harder (though of course networks help). The result will be more local self-organization on the one hand, and a global management model that relies on diversity of perspective and response around the world to elicit innovation.
A very literal example is helping massively parallel computers scale. In the past, the length of time the CPU's clock signal needs to propagate to the other other CPU's has limited the total number of processors--if the number get too large, they must be too far away to stay synched. Now, researchers have found that if each processor contacts a few randomly chosen other CPUs and synchs with them, the entire network remains synched. This seems to me an interesting model for "synching" elements of global companies and value webs.

3. Questions and Answers with Paul Riches and Jeroen Kemp
In their article Knowledge Organisation Transformation Roadmaps Paul Riches and Jeroen Kemp are proposing a model for achieving lasting knowledge advantage, by a continuously adapting business transformation processes. The so called 'KOT Cycle Process' takes the form of a gap analysis, opportunity identification, transformation de-velopment and roadmap execution. The main assessment is done based on the T(raditional) to K(nowledge) Continuum.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS: Atai Ziv, 18th May 2003, "Transformation Roadmaps" - One way?
I found the concept suggested as "Transformation Roadmaps" interesting and valuable.
However, I would like to ask if you can imagine a situation were the transformation is not only "One Way". For example, an organization in tight cash flow problem has to be much more "centralized" managed. If so, how will the knowledge worker accept the "backwards" transformation.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS: Patricia Wolf, 19th May 2003, Direction of transformation
I love Atai's comment: Coming from a knowledge management background, I believe in the feeling that we must support organisations in the transformation process from t to k. But how can we be sure that this is what organisations need? And: We should be aware to argue the transformation direction we are going to support in a very pragmatic, under-standable manner.

Join the discussion! Paul Riches and Jeroen Kemp will answer your postings until the 20th of May!

4. Interview with Dr. Michael Lissack
Emergence and Planning for business development.
This is an extract from an interview done in the course of the second work package of the RODEO project. The interview was done by the IAT (Institute for Human Factors and Technology Management) at the University of Stuttgart.Read the interview!

5. Tool Time with Symphony
About Tool Time: Tool Time intends to provide European and International Research Initiatives with their own Space on the KnowledgeBoard, where they can display the Cur-rent Status of their Developments. As such it provides Unique Insights into the Cutting Edge of Management Thinking and Management Tools.
Last Week's Premiere, Tool Time 1, presented the strategic tools developed by the IST and IMS Project Symphony. SYMPHONY is a global IMS (Intelligent Manufacturing Systems) project. SYMPHONY today is the cooperative effort of in total 30 industrial or research organisations (companies, software and methodological solutions providers, technological transfer centres, universities, etc.) from Europe, Canada and Australia.
To answer questions like "How do companies manage the challenge of long-term sustainability and robustness, when technology and markets are almost unpredictable?", "How do they plan for the future, when real market opportunities are still cloudy and when the development of distinctive capabilities will take years?" and "How do they juggle between daily operational decisions and long-term strategies?", the idea emerged to develop a management approach aimed at optimising the adequacy of process and re-source management all along the problem solving and value creation chains of companies. Read more at: www.symphony-village.com

6. Latest Articles
Abstract by A.C. Garavelli, M. Gorgoglione and V. Albino from Politecnico di Bari: Strategies for Knowledge Transfer - Part One.
The excerpted scientific paper seeks to provide a set of strategies for managing knowledge transfer by focusing on cognition, organizational culture and technology. The issue tackled in the paper is clearly narrower than that of defining "strategy from a KM point of view", which is the month?s theme main focus. However, since knowledge transfer can be seen as a basic mechanism for creating value through the intangible assets, the article represents a possible answer, though partial, to the question of integrating knowledge with other value creation enablers.

Article by Dr. Edna Pasher on Strategy, Knowledge and Communication
In today's fast-paced business environment, organizations must continually renew their strategies. The first step is communication. This article Edna Pasher wrote in 1998 ad-dressing the distinction between "KM strategy" and what she likes to call "strategy in a knowledge based organisation" opened a very vital discussion. Join the discussion!

7. This Week Agenda:
Week discussion theme: The Development of Strategy (process & content)

Monday, 19.05.2003
Weekly Digest about the activities and outcomes of week 2

11.00-12.00 CET
Online workshop with two Strategy experts - Ron Meyer from Strategy Works & the Strategy Academy and Prof. Kazem Chaharbaghi from East London Business School on: "Current Issues in Strategy Development"

Tuesday, 20.05.2003
Q&A (the whole week; asynchronous) Kickoff with Strategy expert Peer Ederer from Strategy Works & the Strategy Academy on: "Perspectives on network level strategy"

Friday, 23.05.2003
Interview with Prof. Kazem Chaharbaghi from East London Business School on themes from the Online Workshop