Results tagged “best practices” from Knowledge Jolt with Jack

Brett Miller has some interesting thoughts about memory and anti-memory. Maybe we need to learn how to forget.

A new HBS working paper by Deishin Lee and Eric Van den Steen, "Managing Know-How," looks at companies that keep best practices and model employee use of the best practices and company decisions about recording new practices with an economic model.

Christian Wagner discusses the problems with knowledge acquisition and suggests that wikis in combination with communities might be a solution for knowledge acquisition where more formal processes have failed.

Ross Mayfield kicked off a winding discussion with "The End of Process" in which he complains that "process" is over-used. Many others have contributed to the discussion, in case you haven't seen it.

Dinesh Tantri talks about a new approach to best practices within in his organization where employees are encouraged to challenge best practices and work out their resolution within communities tied to those practices.

The March/April 2002 issue of Ivey Business Journal had a piece by Nancy Dixon, "The Neglected Receiver of Knowledge Sharing." Dixon presents a helpful perspective to the concept of knowledge sharing, and one that I've heard in pieces previously. The discussion also makes it clearer why best practice databases have such a hard time of it in the KM community.

Michael McLaughlin writes "The Worst Thing About Best Practices." In isolation, I absolutely agree with McLaughlin. However, if they are part of an intelligent process, such as he suggests at the end of the article, best practices can be quite helpful.

I received a couple personal emails in response to my earlier article on the topic of best practices. As people who have been reading in this area for a while know, the topic of best practice and railing against it has been going on for several years. Plenty of reading and thinking is available on both sides of the fence.

Who is right, Voltaire or common parlance: "The good is the enemy of the best" (anonymous). "The best is the enemy of the good" (Voltaire).

Ton Zylstra comments on my review of Bob Hiebeler's KMPro talk last week. Specifically he is concerned with missing opportunities by relying too heavily on best practices.