Here are a few theses ….
We often call people good or bad people. There are, however, no bad or good people. The only things that might be good or bad are what these people do. Consequently, you should judge behaviour, rather than persons.
That is more or less what I learned in ethics and philosophy.
It is similar with knowledge. There is no such thing as good or bad, useful or useless knowledge. With applying knowledge, you can “make an impression” or “have an effect”. Knowledge itself is of no value. In order to be useful – for instance for solving problems or on the way towards progress or innovation – it has to live.
You have to share knowledge – then it will actually increase. But how to organize the sharing of knowledge? After all, knowledge is dynamic and always depends on the context. Context-dependent dynamics cannot easily be packed into a container. That is the problem you face with knowledge management.
Here are a few terms probably related to knowledge:
Education • Cultivation • Experience (of Life) • Enlightenment • Expertise • Practice
This is how I arrive at ideas such as craftsmanship. We discover the master and the apprentice. We understand the importance of handing your expertise on, showing someone how to do things, learning and practicing! And how these processes can be promoted through the four-eyes-principle and p2p reviews (peer-to-peer). Mind you, this is not only true for software development.
And new questions arise, as well:
Where to use knowledge? Who uses knowledge? Is it the “white-collar” workers? Can you really call them “brain workers”?
And:
How do people work in enterprises – which I call social systems with an economic goal?
How can you design such a system to be both successful and bearable?
Ideas such as self-organization and self-determining spring up. I believe that the knowledge and expertise of many can be merged in an ethical and dominance-free way, thus being formative for our future.
But in self-organized systems, there will also be roles or activities you can summarize as follows:
Decisions • Leadership • Communication • Management • Responsibility
So what exactly does that mean in such a system? Here is what I propose:
Decisions
Decisions are always accompanied by a certain degree of uncertainty and must have a significant consequence. Otherwise we are not talking a decision. A “good” decision maker can try to do more good than harm by trying to base his decisions on an ethically responsible balancing of values. But he cannot question the unpredictability of the future, neither can he try to burden others with it.
Leadership
Leadership means that you set the scene for all parties concerned in the environment you are responsible for so that their personal lives are more enhanced than reduced in many dimensions. For instance by creating a fear-free zone. And I mean full of the necessary respect you show towards the task of leadership.
Communicating
The requirement for good communication is that you are prepared to meet at eye-level and to listen. You also have to have empathy, think in an altero-centric way and have respect for others.
Management
Basically, it only means you have to treat change with responsibility. If an enterprise is in a state of stability, it will generally do very good business. Except: there comes a time when too much stability will mean death. On the other hand, constant change will be detrimental for the balance sheets. If you manage to give justice to both ends of the scale, then what you are doing is “management”.
Responsibility
The environment I accept responsibility for is where my decisions have an effect. Consequently, I must be aware what consequences my decisions will have. I cannot ignore them.
Persons who decide, lead, communicate, manage and take responsibility are persons I call entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneur
A good manager is a manager whose decisions are more often correct than wrong. Someone whose judgement is more often good than poor.
All of these ideas are contrary to what I officially learned. Consequently, I am now arriving at the
Classical Error:
Many people still believe you can plan the world. Their image of the world is mechanistic and Tayloristic. In this combination, they believe knowledge and dominant logics to guarantee success.
I no longer believe this. The era of a working world strongly based on the division of labour (tayloristic) with mechanized processes disregarding humans is on the decline. It was a very simplistic image of the world. To be sure, it brought us prosperity, but the price was far too high. In order to survive now, we must become AGILE.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
At one time, we had a young lady as guest at InterFace. Daniela Blettner (she is now a university teacher) worked on her dissertational thesis for HSG (Hochschule St. Gallen). Her topic was “Dominant Logics During Enterprise Foundation”. And the results were surprising. All the very successful enterprises she examined had been free of “dominant logics” during their founding process. What is worse: some of them almost failed due to “dominant logic strategies”.
P.S. 1
For more articles of my entrepreneurial diary, click here: Drehscheibe!
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