Nonaka and Takeuchi - urm?

I mentioned in a previous post that I had already read Nonaka and Takeuchi "The knowledge creating company" . In fact I have read it twice. I gave it a go not long after I started in the NHS and I reread it earlier this year. You can access a chunk of it via Google Books.

I would have to say that I am yet to get to grips with it. To give you an idea try this summary / review by a software programmer. I am fairly sure I won't come up with a better one. The key is that "Knowledge creation is the process of making tacit knowledge explicit". This book did much to popularise the concepts of tacit and explicit knowledge.

I think I get a bit lost in all the theory in the book - garbage can models, sensemaking, Schumpeter, Hayek and so on. I tend to follow the arguments at the time I read them and then they drop away from me.

There are some great stories in the book - particularly about generating new ideas. One thing that I liked was the concept of redundancy. The idea is that you have more information than you immediately need - something most librarians are invariably involved in supplying.

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