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While external knowledge -- about customers,
about competitors -- is critical, it rarely provides a competitive
edge for companies because such information is equally available
to everyone. But internal "know-how" that is unique
to a specific company -- how to introduce a new drug into
the diabetes market, how to decrease assembly time in an
automobile plant -- is the stuff of which sustained competitive
advantage is made. Nancy Dixon, an expert in the field of
organizational learning, calls this knowledge borne of experience
"common knowledge," and argues that in order to
get beyond talking about knowledge management to actually
doing it, companies must first recognize that all knowledge
is not created -- and therefore can't be shared -- equally.
Creating successful knowledge transfer systems,
Dixon argues, requires matching the type of knowledge to
be shared to the method best suited for transferring it
effectively. Based on an in-depth study of several organizations
-- including Ernst & Young, Bechtel, Ford, Chevron,
British Petroleum, Texas Instruments, and the U.S. Army
-- that are leading the field in successful knowledge transfer,
Common Knowledge reveals groundbreaking insights
into how organizational knowledge is created, how it can
be effectively shared -- and why transfer systems
work when they do.
Until now, most organizations have had to
rely on costly "trial and error" to find a knowledge
transfer system that works for them. Dixon helps managers
take the guesswork out of this process by outlining three
criteria that must be considered in order to determine how
a transfer method will work in a specific situation: the
type of knowledge to be transferred, the nature of the task,
and who the receiver of that knowledge will be. Drawing
from the successful -- but very different -- practices of
the companies in her study and providing compelling illustrative
stories based on the experiences of real managers, Dixon
distills five distinct categories of knowledge transfer,
explains the principles that make each of them work, and
helps managers determine which of these systems would be
most effective in their own organizations.
Common Knowledge gets to the heart
of one of the most difficult questions in knowledge transfer
today: What makes a system work effectively in one organization
but fail miserably in another? Going beyond "one-size-fits-all"
approaches and simple generalities like upper management
involvement and cultural issues, this important book will
help organizations of every kind construct knowledge transfer
systems tailored to their unique forms of "common knowledge"
-- and in the process create the best kind of competitive
advantage there is: the kind that can't be copied.
Nancy M. Dixon is an Associate Professor
of Administrative Sciences at The George Washington University.
She lives in Washington, D.C.
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