Just Add Management: Seven Steps to Creating a Productive Workplace and Motivating Your Employees In Challenging Times

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Summary: A Knowledge Management How To
Review: The authors discuss their ideas about knowledge management. It is a field that I have been interested in for over 10 years. How can you encode and re-use knowledge in an organization? Can you package knowledge? Can you catalog it? Or does the act of writing down knowledge succeed only in capturing a shadow of its true worth? The authors describe the type of organization that is most likely to be able to foster the creation and re-use of knowledge. They argue that knowledge can be stored for re-use, but this is only possible if there is a predefined context for that knowledge. Like a Library?s Dewey Decimal system, the authors describe a system that gives everyone in an organization the context for storing and re-using knowledge. This system, which they coin the Accountability Management System, can give everyone a common reference for knowledge work. They include portfolio management to provide everyone with a prioritized framework for important activities, process management to provide everyone with a set of suggested guidelines for common activities and how to report progress, time tracking (which the authors call progress tracking) to measure progress, and finally, knowledge management to determine how to treat the bits of knowledge that are encountered. Here the authors go into a bit a detail, since this is the centerpiece of the book. They note the two types of knowledge, tacit and explicit, and they emphasize that they must be handled differently. Explicit knowledge can be stored, and so you should do so in process descriptions or guidelines or work templates. Tacit knowledge is much more valuable but it cannot be stored, and so you must work to spark its creation. This, the authors say, you can only do through getting people together to share and collaborate.
They give many examples and case studies to show how to do this. This book clearly shows how to use an organization?s most precious asset: its knowledge. It describes what knowledge is, how to use it and how to create more of it.

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Summary: Great Guidelines for Running a Knowledge Organization
Review: This book gives a basic outline of what a person needs to do in order to run a knowledge organization. This outline is called the "Accountability Management System", and it describes a set of seven principles that allow managers to gain visibility into their organization. These principles start off fairly broad and philosophical, the first one is: "Your job exists to make this company a success". These first three principles are quickly detailed, they describe the type of culture that is necessary upon which can be built a successful knowledge organization. The remaining four principles are more tactical, and therein lies the real meat and real value of the book. These last four principles include commonly used management tools, but the authors go into a great amount of detail discussing why and how
they should be applied to the knowledge organization. These four principles are portfolio management, program management, time tracking and knowledge management. Many, many books have been written on each one of these topics, but Just Add Management focuses on how to use these tools in a knowledge organization. They are all described with many examples and succinct descriptions on how to implement these concepts. Using these principles, the book ties them all together, and shows how all of these tools, working together, can bring visibility to management. They reinforce each other, and ensure that the organization is using the knowledge of all of its people.

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Summary: Great advice
Review: This is a great book. It talks about how to really manage people. The authors seem to know what they are talking about; they talk about their backgrounds and experiences with managing difficult people. Some of these experiences weren't so good, so you can tell they speak from experience.

Rating:
Summary: Great Guidelines for Running a Knowledge Organization
Review: This is great advice for any manager, how to keep people in line, but still let them be creative and do their thing.