Chris Macrae, 13-Dec-04 @ 09:16AM

thanks

Dear Denham

I need to peruse the links you have sent me recently but probably won't have time to do this until nearer Christmas as I am off to a global reconciliation ( 1 ,2) conference in Delhi on Wednesday

In fact the talk I am giving emerges here.http://worldnetworkcare.blogspot.com/

It may be of sume interest in one respect. I want to make a heavy pitch for in search of amateurs instead of only experts/excellence.

Roughly what I mean is this. There are many issues I can opnly ever be an amateur on : water angels, East versus West, Youths worldwide attempts to expose corrumption or conversational systems that waste their time or open selection of careers. As an amateur, all I can do is swap stories: something wonderful on water (and ecology of everything to do with globe and poor human beings that water touches) seems to be happening eg around here http://whynotfoz.blogspot.com/

...then if I bump into a hi-trust someone who finds the same story intersting/heroic, I can connect them to the most central person in the story I know of. What there is no point in doing is an expert cross-examining my amateur knowledge more than that. At a live conference that wastes our time and may make me feel foolish and a bit hurt (or as I get elder, tired) in front of so many people with expert constructs and their own jargon languages. At a virtual community (not helped when a search engine is so pathetic as KB's), it makes for noisy conversations that end up spiralling into some kind of information fog within the community's walls or 100 blogs that dont link (unless you are in the inner circle of blogging but again that doesnt help the original amateur cause).

If this attempt to praise the open search for amateurs is off the path of boundary (and I dont think it is but that might take a long conversation on whether we agree how 12th grade email works and other topics) then apologies; its what's on my mind before I go to Delhi- clearly the best a Westerner can be on East. Urgently now West reconciliation is imo about being a listener, an amateur, someone who tries not to remove his own cultural biasses (often whipped up by mass media) enough to be trust-linking).

Denham Grey, 12-Dec-04 @ 15:10PM

Poverty & AIDS

Chris,

This Wiki project may interest you.

http://www.openpeople.info/index.php/OneVillage/OneVillage

Denham Grey, 05-Dec-04 @ 15:07PM

BOs - innovation and personal

Chris,

Here are some examples of collaborative and innovation - The RFP (request for proposal) is a firm to firm BO that may lead to collaboration and new innovations.

At a personal level - a 360 review piece where colleagues are asked to comment on your performance, communication, collaboration, team playing... is one BO that is very personal, another example is your personal e-profile or portfolio if others can contribute via annotation or comments.

Chris Macrae, 05-Dec-04 @ 11:26AM

playing with BOs

I imagine BOs provide a dynamic that could stimulate diverse inquiries and paterns of action learning

A couple of different questions;

Do you have an example of a BO that has led an organisation into a huge and collaborative innovation?

Do BO's apply not just to organsiations but eg at the personal level to where we were focused as most expert yesterday and where we become most practically expert at connecting tomorrow?

Denham Grey, 05-Dec-04 @ 02:20AM

Boundary objects & K-audits

There are many BOs at work within a firm. Let's take the purchase order as an example.

A customer request arrives in many forms (via the phone, e-mail, retailers bulk order, gift card redemption, personal visit.....) Customer service completes the puchase order and our BO starts it's journey.

At the shipping bay, a clerk interprets the request, pulls the stock and holds shipment until credit is checked and shipping address verified. If the item is not available, the order passes to manufacturing for completion where its receipt triggers further activity.

After shipment, stocks are adjusted, revenue accounted for, receivables are incremented and warranty risks evaluated.

This BO can thus be used to track heuristics for dealing with exceptions, its role in forecasting and planning production explicated, competency gaps can be noted and opportunities for re-engineering, automation, escalation and other business refinements assessed.

Chris Macrae, 04-Dec-04 @ 23:38PM

interesting

Following boundary objects sounds intriguing - can you give us an example? Boundary knowledge of all types is something we ignore at our ignorance, but then I have noticed Kboard largely ignores all collaborative innovation conversations however hard a few of us try and raise them.

Ignorance about intangibles (goodwill) is scandalous. Denham: I think you may undervalue human relationships by not connecting both the economic and the social.

Unlike the machine age, we could describe the service or knowledge economy as that in which most future financial/economic value and essentially all human value (communal good emotions, learning, safety, cultural depth , sustainability, care about human rights of 6 bilion people etc) connects to intangibles. The scandal is that those in the late 80s who sought a global monopoly for accounting tangibles knew full well that their measures had no connection whatsoever with systemising identity/intangibles, and worse mathematically are perfect for separating instead of connecting, and blinding people to compound consequences. (I know because I worked at one of the Big 5 trying to put the case for people but battling against 90 years of professional myopia takes more than one person to make any real change). Yet through pure greed and opportunity of globally monopolising the boardroom functions of measurement the Big 5 obfuscated everything that could be of human value in an era where instead of people standing in line between dumb machines, its the turn of smart machines to support people who deeply care about specific identities. Why Denham do you imply that you are not interested in connecting the economic with the social. By ducking out you miss the opportunity to argue that it is healthy societies that develop string econiomies and not vice versa?

The Intangibles Crisis is debriefed here for anyone who feels the knowledge age could be greater for human beings (isnt it time that people were counted investments instead of machines - another assumption that tangible accountants wickedly makle the other way)

Denham Grey, 04-Dec-04 @ 22:00PM

KM audits

An approach to KM auditing that works for me is to follow boundary objects as they move from community to community within and across firms.

These BOs carry meaning, information and implicit self-organization from place to place. If you can the important BOs, you will soon surface issues, learning and business opportunities, understand the touch-points between groups, find mavens and brokers.

http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?BoundaryObject

In my practice a KM audit is not about putting economic values to intangibles - it is about finding gaps, surfacing opportunities, understanding constraints and making knowledge flows more effective.

Chris Macrae, 12-May-04 @ 08:39AM

Rinaldo's question from Italy part 2

So what basis of expertise does a knowledge audit draw on. Four come first to mind:

http://www.kekma.com essentially uses the positive kind of employee survey approach; it will typically put a light survey up online for anyone to fill in and then follow up qualitatively people who respond in surprising ways such as they have a big skill that’s not being used but they believe is vital to the organisation’s next leap forward in it vision

One of my open source methods seeks to match a quiz connecting employee’s identities with that of the whole corporations’ context- called chartering of living scripts you can see more here http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=21015

Then there are the subsets of intellectual capital or intangibles auditing that integrate the most human beings could do on a map of an organisation drawn as a relationship infrastructure of productivities and demand –under the term Human Capital there is connecting work done on this in Nordica but in most of the erst of Europe and the USA disconnecting work done under the same name –anti-knowledge auditing in my lexicon

Then there are KM books that deliberately connect KM and systems theory, which is my interpretation of what Firestone & Mcelroy were doing here, but they may or may not agree. http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=123825

Would be delighted to see what menu of audits you end up with one day

Cheers

Chris macrae

Chris Macrae, 12-May-04 @ 08:38AM

Rinaldo's question from Italy -part 1

I am trying to carry on with respect the Knowledge Audit process. I would be very grateful.

This is my phd thesis' topic. I have just started in this but I am trying to guide my self. Please, could you suggest to me a (small) number of key books/papers to read in order to have an overview on this topic?

Indeed I would be pleased to describe to you my thesis project (if suitable for you...

One of my difficulties in trying to answer your question is I am not a formal expert in KM- I don’t even know how it defines where it starts and ends. For 25 years I have worked in neighbouring disciplines – many that pre-existed KM . Its worth briefly summarising some of their perspectives

Drucker began using term knowledge worker probably late 1970s. He used the term to start imaging how organisation would need to be different once the main value was produced by diverse skills of people rather than monotony of machines. He specifically said we would have to measure rewards and performance differently; that we would need to map in different ways than just top-down organigrams if we were to see how teams, communities etc fitted in to multiply the knowhow of the organisational system of relationships of productivities and demands. He may not have used the words knowledge audit, but he was asking for us to design such

Then building on organisational learning inquiry methods for 15 years or so, Senge brought out the 5th discipline in the late 80s; it provides a language or constructs that any knowledge audit would need to connect with. Connect & Context- these are 2 vital system dynamics wholly opposite to non-systemic approaches including all tangible accounting which literally is based on maths of separation and standard before context

Now since the first 10 years of my career was spent as an opinion researcher – applied particularly to impacts of global corporations on local societies – I can say that potentially anything that calls itself an employee survey could be a knowledge audit. It depends actually on how the survey is going to be used. Unfortunately most employee surveys are used either for PR terms or to conflict with the interests of sustaining a knowledge worker system by downsizing or whatever. I have some friends who are convening a roundtable for HR directors on this very topic in next 6 weeks - email me at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk if you know someone who might want to join this free party

Chris Macrae, 10-Mar-04 @ 12:45PM

human interdisciplinary links

This post is mainly about some links I would have liked to include in a post I made on a great thread
here
that is emerging on connecting KM with all ther other human disciplines including those with:
-the word Human, eg Human Resources
-the word organisation, eg Organisation Development and Organisation Design
-those with the word Learning- such as organisation learning systems or action learning practices
-those that KM appears to have adopted such as Community of
-and others such as Emotional Intelligence which I dont know if they see themselves in any of the above

When I was first designated sig editor of KM & EI - I thought **** me what the heck is EI. I know a lot about values, purpose, identity and trust from my main home disciplines- what I started learning was EI is also about loops such as:
Courage to Fear
Joy of accomplishment to Boredom
Love of Open Diversity to being Prejudicial, Narrow and Closed
(Before ever hearing of EI, I had come across a wonderful map of these loops in expert circles that contrast the difference in feelings/behavious between those openly acting mutually for win-win and those who think they are win-losing(profiting from someone) but are knowledge and social net mappable as lose-losers

I also started collating some links to networks that seemed open enough on any of the disciplines I could find

Organisation Learning - listserve http://www.learning-org.com
Organisational Design Forum http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=123852&d=1&h=417&f=56&dateformat=%o%20%B%20%Yhttp://www.organizationdesignforum.org/
Emotional Literacy http://www.antidote.org.uk
Virtual Interdisciplinary Community http://groupjazz.com/chautauqua/
Personal Change http://www.newintermediaries.co.uk/
Large Scale Change http://www.openspaceworld.com

I'll update as I have a few more somewhere!

Chris Macrae, 26-Feb-04 @ 17:40PM

Laws or PRINCIPLES - when openly researching manifestos

I had an idea of taking a manifesto from virtual community to community and open space to place on what people of all kninds want the world's most 100 powerful networks of organisations should transprently be governed by
-eg february's communal debrief is here
we got into some controversy as whether the manifesto's clauses should be called :
laws
or PRINCIPLES

I tried to google the person in Km who I see as a lodestar on this but it looks from this as if the jury's still out. Any comments?
pattern rules of networked world @ here

PRINCIPLES & Laws

The Future of Knowledge-excerpt
... Intangibles operate by the law of social value, and we are only ... Verna Allee, Prepublication
draft for The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity Through ...
www.vernaallee.com/ secondary%20pages/The%20Future%20of%20Knowledge-excerpt.htm - 28k - Feb 24, 2004 -
The Prosperity Potential

I began this book by suggesting that an intangibles economy offers a far better foundation for prosperity than one based only on tangible and monetary value. Money is a commodity that is controlled by only a relatively few members of society. Knowledge and favors are within the power of everyone to create, distribute and exchange. In the right climate of trust, positive reinforcement fuels a continuing cycle of intangible wealth creation.

There is no need to overthrow the old economic order to usher in a new abundance. We did not overthrow agriculture when we moved to an industrial economy; it was absorbed into a new economic order. We will continue to include money and tangibles in the range of things we might negotiate. But with intangibles we expand our economic possibilities and opportunities.

Tangibles operate by the laws of physics. They have their own laws and dynamics that we are well familiar with. Intangibles operate by the law of social value, and we are only now learning their true role and contribution to value creation. I anticipate that our business understanding will evolve to a larger perspective and a new economic synthesis that understands all of these exchanges from an expanded worldview. Right now, our questions about intangibles are anomalies that we do not understand quite yet. But as we pursue our questions, they will serve as the gateway to our future knowledge.

Collaborative Communities 2003 Online Conference
... Verna Allee, Senior Associate of KonvergeandKnow and President of Verna Allee Associates
The ... Reed's Law of Group Forming Networks shows that groups grow at a ...
www.icohere.com/cc2003/program.htm

chris macrae, 14-Feb-04 @ 17:22PM

big conversation spaces/communities compared

http://groupjazz.com/chautauqua/

Starting Sunday Feb15, 4 of the world's greatest global brand experts and myself as fool are being openly cross-examined at the big tent - this caucus platform runs until the end of the month, and caucus is quite an interestingly different knowledge communing dynamic because it lets subscribers choose thread subscriptions, and every time they return it tells them which has updated. It also lets any registered person attach downloads, to any post.

Here's a sample of the dialogue rehersals already going on in the cafe to the main tent

18:5) 14-FEB-2004 07:27 Carol H Tucker
I beleive that branding is actually part and parcel of crafting the customer experience -- it is part of the unique indentifier of the organization in its' to customers, employees and other stakeholders.....

18:6) 14-FEB-2004 12:04 chris macrae
I agree with your view Carol. But how to systemise it?
The main corporate governance issue we have in today's world of intangible and networked capitals is how to make everyone in an organisation measurable to transparency of the the brand's future -its integrity of relationships so that all stakeholders' value win-wins and sustains over time and so that the fundamental long-run purpose of an organisation isnt eroded by short-term goals. Take the example of NASA. Safety should have been valued systemically as much over time as costs and schedules- but because the other two had financial measures reinforcing them every quarter, whilst saftey had nothing so systemically influencing people's behaviours, NASA lost challenger. It is failing to be measuranle to your brand's most sustainable relationhip goals and gravity of purpose that is weak management culture, or value destructive branding.

Harrison Owen, a previous Chatq host and originator of open space transparency, says that today many if not most organisations are able to do what they were designed to do. System relationship conflicts are not being audited and resolved, so the most enduring human purpose gets eroded. Without transparent conflict-auditing of brand trust-flow, mathematical models now demonstrates that each of the world's largest 1000 organisations is putting 10 billion dollars needlessly at risk over the next 5 years by focusing only on measurement of the last 90 days and not how the whole system is compounding forward.

More on 10 billion dollar auditing, and why its a huge democratic issue as well as a business one at http://www.valuetrue.com

Chris Macrae, 06-Feb-04 @ 14:56PM

who do you think is the greatest KM writer not to be in Brint's top 58

My excellent monthly mailing from http://www.meansbusiness.com led me to Brint's top 58 KM listing - do you feel they left out anyone and if so from what criteria?
-eg overall seminal influence on what KM does next?
-diversity of national views of KM?
-most wonderful influence on networks for human progress?

http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=122764&d=1&h=417&f=56&dateformat=%o%20%B%20%Y

I believe this question is vital in the context meansbusiness linked it to KM's being everyone's metadiscipline. I'd also love to hear who you feel are the most open facilitators of KM's connectivity with other professions impacting what kinds of 21st C ofrganisations we- and our children - live with http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=122616&d=1&h=417&f=56&dateformat=%o%20%B%20%Y

Chris Macrae, 05-Feb-04 @ 14:59PM

addendum

I wanted to illustrate in my previous post with another case, hopefully one that is further removed from the passions that virtual community may incite in greater experts than me

but the 2000 character rule stopped my conversational flow , so here's the addendum I would rather have posted all as one:

...Whether or not you agree with some of what I have construed, I hope I have illustrated that conversations on 'values' can go into very deep controversies. If you want to see how for example we are seeking to deconstruct mass media before it can be reassembled to value people humanly have a look at http://www.beyond-branding.com/blog/blogger.html
February 5 The Extreme Prissyness of Mass Media

Chris Macrae
@Emotional Intelligence
@valuetrue transparency maps
@Networks of Excellence or Curiosity

Chris Macrae, 05-Feb-04 @ 14:55PM

conversing about values

My favourite conversation topic is about values- what is love, faith, hope? what is trust? which values do we care most about at people to people levels which we don't see designed into organisational systems or in media? And is there any valuable reason why the values that you cherish most at a people to people level are not the ones we should most cherish transparently in organisational systems and mediated conversations, also CoPs etc?

The other day I was reminded of this posting, actually made 5 years ago in one of those heroic list-serves that make the net worth every pain the virus hackers can send us (by the way if you ever want to share you greatest listserve- the one you have spent your most time in please do )

Here's the listserve bookmark and part of its content:
http://www.learning-org.com/99.10/0095.html
Maturana defines:

Love is the domain of relational behaviors through which another (a
person, being, or thing) arises as a legitimate other in coexistence
with oneself.

and...

Aggression is the domain of relational behaviors in which another is
negated as a legitimate other in coexistence with oneself.

(I believe "love" and "aggression" are mutually exclusive sets of behaviors.)
----------------
Apply this to people behaviours in virtual community. These are the blocks to building action learning relationships that I have observed over the last 10 years. Do you have a similar or different listing?

1) Hard to get a conversation started
2) If a community organiser does the perspiration needed to get a great membership crowd and if someone starts an imaginative conversation hitting communal chord, these dynamics happen in quick succession:
-people start posting, a great start
-then people come in jealously criticising either because the linear view is opposite to their biggest perspective or because they dont like this topic to have become the most popular membership one
-later people start using the magnetising terminology that headlined the thread in other threads- usually cutting across the original meaning that made that topic a large conversation

Once you've seen this happen repeatedly, there are several choices:
busy or intelligent folk decide open virtual community is a waste of time

the real conversations of the community go on behind the surface but the surface retains just enough feeling that members keep on signing up only to get frustrated at the surface level

the real real conversations then take on hybrid formats such as open spacing and ordinary email...(not the spam kind but where everyone is aligned around helping each person to find their own 10 best lifetime mentors)http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=122627&d=1&h=417&f=56&dateformat=%o%20%B%20%Y

Chris Macrae@Emotional Intelligence

Chris Macrae, 27-Jan-04 @ 13:15PM

exchange-based theories of the firm

Personally I believe that if we played with this language more, we could find a way of newly seeing all the greatest emerging possibilities of networks which in Denham's case I take to be virtual life in all its liberating communal senses and in Lauri's case include democarcy's rights to see its investments advance a region's prsoperity and social health through diversity

Out there in the worlds of strategy and valuation, there are two conflicting perspectives: transactions and relationships. The difference as far as knowledge and behaviours are concerned is that the transactional ruler asks : how do we get precision by separating one thing from another, whereas the relationship navigator asks what more can we humanly connect?

Both views have a certain validity. When Henry Ford installed factory lines, his machines were his biggest investment. He didn’t want humans getting in the way and breaking them or destroying the uniformity of the product. People were time and motioned separately in terms of consistently interacting with the machines. My guess is that the service and knowledge economy has somewhat different value multipliers. By adopting an exchange-based view of a firm, we can mathematically model the most critical relationship questions which strategists and valuation experts will need to systematically address.

ask for more links or tell me a methodology etc you would like to see a conversation on in terms of how its relationship mapping of value and startegy differs from its tranactional appraisal

Chris Macrae, 26-Jan-04 @ 02:29AM

pamphlet 75

I received Tom Heuerman's 75 pamphlet today from http://www.amorenaturalway.com . These are Tom's words but if you want to converse with me then we'll probably be wasting each other's time unless you feel the challenge described below is one you have met and one that transparency networks should seek to resolve

TH writes:
Many organizations remain fundamentally dishonest and mediocre places where, as colleague Kenny Moore wrote, no one trusts, no one believes management, and where workers are too stressed to care. We deny emotions, side-step issues, and abuse others. We waste talent from ignorance and selfishness. The fragmentation of responsibility diminishes accountability at all levels. The search for consensus makes cowards of most. The demand for conformity denies the uniqueness of each person (and each person’s unique talents), and these dumbed-down environments refuse greatness to most.

Organizations cast large shadows of fear, envy, anger, anxiety, jealousy, and frustration. The organizational shadows are places of brutality, arrogance, selfishness, zero-sum games, and dishonest competition. Quick-fix schemes promise relief and change. In reality they provide only diversion from reality. Recent Gallup data shows both the reality and the potential of organizational dysfunction. We made our organizations this way; therefore, we can change them. What a great opportunity for real leaders.

In the book Now Discover Your Strengths authors Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. call for a talent revolution. Citing a Gallup Organization data base of 1.7 million employees, they assert that only 20% of employees feel their strengths are used on the job every day.

Buckingham and Clifton call on organizations to reverse the historical focus on the improvement of weaknesses and instead identify and develop talents by adding knowledge and skills to their definition of talent: Naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied.

Additional Gallup data shows that people who work in organizations where they have the opportunity to do what they do best every day were 50% more likely to work in business units with lower employee turnover, 38% more likely to work in more productive business units, and 44% more likely to work in business units with higher customer satisfaction scores.

Chris Macrae, 26-Jan-04 @ 01:01AM

My greatest disappointment with virtual meta-community

I've been playing with virtual meta-communities for 10 years (so before ever posting at KB I had as many professional members in my ibox as KB has signed up)

What disappoints me most about the surface of meta-communities is how few people can be bothered to start conversations around what the other person might have deep experience in. Its funny when people use email they can do quite well, but when they post in virtual communities there's seldom genuine questioning aimed at learning from an expert (with the possible exception of asynchronous formats)

Something I have a lot of practice at is finding my own best 10 mentors, what I call the 12th grade of email usage. You can find that at http://www.knowledgeboard.com/community/zones/sig/kmei.html
I wonder whether anyone will feel bothered to query that learning practice...

Chris Macrae, 25-Jan-04 @ 22:51PM

would appreciate it if people questioned me on my faults not...

...the faults of KB as a platform or the EU

I believe KB has some fundamental weaknesses as a platform; for nearly 2 years I have tried both to start a debate with sift on this with other sig editors and to provide a space where such suggestions can be collated
http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=99663&d=1&h=417&f=56&dateformat=%o%20%B%20%Y
I dont understand where sift is in addressing these; if sugestions like mine or Denham's are 'wrong' in Sift's view, let's hear it. They have meta-experince across 100 communities, or so it appears every time one loads a file

Let's also be clear. Denham you and I have tried out many community platform cauci, prisms, all sorts- I've never come across a perfect one yet. Once you have 5000 members as KB does have, most of the value isnt in the surface anyhow , its in the permission to cross-network by email behind the surface.

One other thing. I am a volunteer at KB. Unlike some I have never been paid a Euro nor do any suggestions I have on the KB platform carry any more weight than eg anyone else who posts at this thread. So criticise the content I have put up; or what threads i could have started but havnet had the imagination or expertise to do here in this thread by all means BUT please dont continue to post stuff that is way beyond anything I can impact.

Lauri Grohn, 25-Jan-04 @ 20:59PM

Questions forbidden on this Forum

A few years ago I made some prognoses of four KM projects called ACCESS-MAINTS, PATTERNS, LEVER and KITS, to to found here:

http://personal.eunet.fi/pp/ske/text/eval99.html

In order to verify my prognoses I have tried to track the results of those projects but without no success. The links are lost or the links only give years old data. Concerning the millions of European taxpayers money spend for those I would ask your to help me to find the documents describing the resultst of those projects.

Denham Grey, 25-Jan-04 @ 20:51PM

Conversation starters

Chris,

May I suggest it is not the people (or their countries) so much as the concepts and the questions that will induce reciprocity and discussion.

I would gladly contribute to conversations around knowledge creation, advanced knowledge practices for global (virtual) teams and ways to increase group awareness.

The structure here at Knowledge Board is not condusive to intense discussions. Navigation is non-intuitive & difficult, finding SIG's to address your urgent questions, uncertain, and starting new threads on topics that carry your passion, impossible.

Software that points to the opening article but does not let you scroll and see the comment you are replying to - has questionable
utility.

I still do not know how to link to or cross-reference a specific comment rather than the entire thread!

Agreee with Lilia we need a KM concept taxonomy and a RSS feed so we can tune into stuff that is exciting, interesting and useful.

http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/22.html#a935

Lauri Grohn, 25-Jan-04 @ 18:50PM

Finland - nothing special execpt Nokia, of course

If we leave out the remarkable success of Nokia - there is nothing special in Finland
compared to the other EU Countries:

http://europa.eu.int/comm/lisbon_strategy/pdf/COM2004_029_en.pdf

The Competitiveness reports written by consultantants are just unscientific collections of opininions, nothing else.

Chris Macrae, 25-Jan-04 @ 16:17PM

Allee's exchange based-theory of the firm -what a breakthrough for KM

Assuming I am learning correctly, I can imagine every discipline wishing that Allee was one of their gurus- how lucky KM is

extracts from a conversation
chris to verna:
I'm getting very excited by the toolkit. Can I check I am learning correctly? You are blueprinting an exchange based theory of the firm as opposed to eg a process or competence-one. A natural advantage of exchanged-based is that exchanges as molecular atoms naturally identify dynamics between pairs of interacting participants

This immediately enables the mapper to involve all in openly visualising/auditing whether the system construction is transactional or relationship (win-win) based at every molecule mapped. Having got managers focusing on that, one can add in extra questions such as are we looking at lavlue in every intangible way not just old tangible ways, and then one can link to ideas like much of learning's value multiplies in use instead of getting used up. (I wonder what other link-ins this leads to first)

If I've broadly digested this correctly, I was wondering which of my friends and colleagues to connect in conversation. Examples include:

Alan Mitchell the business journalist who is editing our the valuetrue.com fieldbbook's macro-exchange audit view of the networked firm, which may be a perfect compliment to your mollecular one

John Caswell of www.grouppartners.net. John has for 20 years been mapping firms for boardrooms but at the process level.

previously verna to chris:
Thank you so much for your support and enthusiasm for my work. One of my disappointments last fall was not getting to meet you also. Fortunately, it looks like I will be doing some things in the UK and Europe later this year so we will have other opportunities. My master classes at KM Europe and Greenwich University were very well received and I will probably be doing one or two again soon. Since you did not have an opportunity to attend one of those sessions last fall, perhaps you would enjoy taking a look at my web based toolkit?

Chris Macrae, 25-Jan-04 @ 16:03PM

thanks Lauri and denham

Lauri,I try local based threads such as Finland's so local people take over editing their accuracy and focus. Personally I find Finland a remarkable country to learn from and in(almost bar none). Equally I am saddened if not all is going smoothly, and I look forward to you commenting in the Finland thread on what needs to be done another way http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=111774&d=1&h=417&f=56&dateformat=%o%20%B%20%Y

I will not retract without more evidence on 2 points. Lots of data shows Finland's people are very highly networked online ( in more valuably sustaining ways that most countries- but I look forward to other people's recommendations of countries that really are developing their knowledge society's social & technical capital in such rich tandem). Geographically Finland is a disconnected country but with educated people - economically this is the kind of nation that can benefit first from virtual's power to connect those who were previously disconnected from making the most productive use of their people's time. I think of New Zealand too, and parts of Canada and rest of Nordica..

Maybe I need to look at Denham's post in more detail another time. I was not intending the IC of Nation portraits at http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=121706&d=1&h=417&f=418&dateformat=%o%20%B%20%Y to be anything more than conversation starters (surely this should be a big open conversation- doent your country's progress matter?), and ones that made sure that IC's frame doesnt get too narrowly constructed. Regarding tangible accountants; hey I'm a marketer who knows one has to get a message to have fair shares; until we go from near zero to all business leaders know that tangible accounting is the worst maths for governing most of the value exchange of service, knowledge or networked economies, I'll no more stop breathing that message than some that Denham does in rightly championing wiki's and evolution of such communal software (apologies for not being uptodate on all that- I'm most glad of your bookmarks to that field). There is zero purpose in talking about KM of trust or any other emotional intelligence if the numbers are rigged to compound dis-trust, destroy joy of action learning, knock the courage and openness out of teams etc

Knowing me I probably can't manage to be more diverse- Denham, the idea of the open coross-examing challenge was to situate diversity around each person- shall I set up a thread on cross-examining Denham Grey?

one more thought for now- bookmark diversely different threads I'd spend time in if I had a second brain : 1

Lauri Grohn, 25-Jan-04 @ 15:08PM

Disappoint report concerning Finland

Mr. Macraes last short rewiew of Finland was very disappointing.

1) The KM report of the Finnish parliament contains a lot of rubbish, just use "find" for e.g. Ståhle or Prigogine. See also

http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=83159

2) The secrect of Nokia was according to Mr. Ollila in a) putting everything on mobiles just when the structural change started and b) opening world markets (globasization).

3) Dipoli is an old bankrupted student house and a minor body in Finnish conference system.

4) The town of Espoo has many years had a "strategy" that is not a strategy at all, having a "vision" that is not a vision at all etc. losing many of its possibilities for empty rhetoric. Nice town, anyway, I like to sail around its archipelago during summers and just came hour long walk with our dog on the Ice of the bay just over there.

Lauri Gröhn
http://www.synestesia.com

PS. Consultants should not pretend to be reseachers...

Denham Grey, 25-Jan-04 @ 01:58AM

A tirade against numbers

Greetings Chris,

Thanks for the brave challenge. I'm amazed at your networking reach - seems every place I go you are there.

Your attempts to compile and collect national 'pictures' of innovation, social and intellectual capital seem to be misplaced IMO & aimed at a fractal level that is too abstract. You seem to aggregate intangible variables that we have difficulty getting to grips with at basic CoP and group levels and drift in meaninglessness at national levels.

Find the continuous tirade against traditional accounting and your references to the 1984 economist article to be more than a little repetitive, e.g.

With his father Norman Macrae of The Economist, he wrote, in 1984, the seminal future history book, “The 2024 Report”, mapping human system scenarios of networking, integration of social and economic policies, and clarifying global/local responsibilities of media

Your stand for openness and transparency is admirable, articulate and needs to be heard, but it is becoming akin to spam IMO. (I'm sure you could level similar charges against me)

Would like to see more innovation and diversity in your posts and a clear explanation of exactly what:

Ensure that traditional accountants and numbers merchants have in future to share auditing rights with the mathematical opposite of transparency mapping really means

Admire your energy and empathy with key issues, e.g. trust flows, open space, value networks... but find these are often interjected into web conversations leading to flow disruption.

Chris, trust you will engage in a spirit of learning and not take this as personal attack.

Chris Macrae, 24-Jan-04 @ 04:29AM

My cv and track of posts

http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-site/whoswho.cgi?action=detail&authorid=483168&id=22082

I'll try to answer questions

or link you to nearest discussion on an issue you nominate as far as my knowledge goes!