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Weightless Wealth Research What to read |
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There have been many books written about intellectual capital, knowledge management, and the knowledge-based economy. What books are worth reading? Here is a list of personal favorites grouped by topic. |
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Title: Andriessen, D. (2004) Making sense of intellectual capital: designing a method for the valuation of intangibles. Burlington: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. ISBN: 0-7506-7774-0 Clarify: I don’t recommend it because I have written it myself, but because I still believe it provides a good and critical overview of the field. It highlights the various definitions and taxonomies of intellectual capital, the various motives for measuring or valuing intellectual capital and provides a detailed review of 25 different management methods. Challenge: I wrote this book before I discovered the metaphorical nature of intellectual capital. So the book is at times critical about the concept of intellectual capital without being able to explain why this is. Create: A sequel to the book should explore the consequences of the fact that the concept of intellectual capital is based on the KNOWLEDGE AS RESOURCE and KNOWLEDGE AS CAPITAL metaphor. |
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Title: Marr, B. (ed.) (2005), Perspectives on Intellectual Capital, Burlington: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. ISBN 0-7506-7799-6 Clarify: I must admit that I was a bit skeptical about this book when I reviewed the book proposal for the publisher. I thought it was confusing that the book covered both the measurement of intellectual capital and the management of knowledge. It turns out that is one of the strengths of the book; it acknowledges the multidisciplinary nature of the concept describing it from 15 different perspectives. Challenge: The book falls short in explaining why the concept of intellectual capital has been adopted by so many disciplines. I think the reason is that the KNOWLEDGE AS CAPITAL metaphor is a metaphor that is extremely rich in entailments and resonates with CEO’s. CFO’s, accountants and many other disciplines. However, the book could have point out some of the limitations of the metaphor provide insight into alternative metaphors for knowledge. Create: I next version of the book may contain a chapter called: ‘A metaphorical perspective on Intellectual Capital’. |
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Title: M’Pherson, P. K., and Pike, S. (2001) Accounting, empirical measurement and Intellectual Capital. Journal of Intellectual Capital, Year: Sep 2001 Volume: 2 Issue: 3 Page: 246 – 260 Clarify: This article is the first to approach the problem of measuring intellectual capital using measurement theory. It shows that measurement theory can help identify criteria for proper measurement of IC. If you apply those criteria it becomes clear that most measurement methods do not past the test. Challenge: The article uses measurement theory that was developed to measure phenomena in the physical world. It fails to acknowledge the big difference between physical phenomena like the temperature of water, and social phenomena like intellectual capital. Create: Research should be done into the consequences of the social nature of intellectual capital for the application of measurement theory. |
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Title: Intellectual Capital Statements – The New Guideline Clarify: This Guideline is the result of the work of Prof. Dr. Jan Mouritsen from the Copenhagen Business School. It describes in a very practical way how organizations can create a statement describing what they do to manage their intellectual capital resources. It does not assume the organization has a strategy (because most organizations don’t have one) but instead helps organizations to create a ‘knowledge narrative’. The concept of a narrative, a story describing how the organization uses its knowledge resources to create value for customers is very powerful. I have applied this method to several Small and Medium Sized companies and it works very well. Challenge: The method does not assume a business strategy but it also totally seems to ignore business strategies. It has a strong inside-out focus and needs to be supplemented with an outside-in focus: what use value should the organization produce? What should be its customers? What should be its products and services? What kind of business model should it use? What part of the value chain should it focus on? How can it extract more value from its knowledge resources? The method explicitly does not view knowledge as an asset or a stock. It ignores the knowledge itself and instead focuses on the resources for knowledge (customers, processes, technology, employees). While this makes it more practical and less abstract, sometimes it is important to look at the knowledge itself, for example in the form of intellectual property. This is especially relevant when there are opportunities to extract value from intellectual property. Create: When using The New Guideline it is wise to add an outside-in perspective, for example by doing a market analysis based on Michael Porter’s five forces model. It is also useful to not only look at knowledge resources bus also at specific forms of intellectual assets, including intellectual property. |
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Title: Cavaleri, S. and Seivert, S. (2005) Knowledge Leadership; The art and science of the Knowledge-based Organization, Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann, Burlington. Clarify: This is an important book as it is the first knowledge
management book that I know of that focuses on the need for organizations to
increase the quality of their knowledge. Most KM books deal with
better sharing of knowledge and the need for innovation. This book applies
the theory of pragmatism to organizations and promotes mechanisms of
experimentation and inquiry within organizations to create pragmatic
knowledge: “Every time you take action to achieve a goal, you gain new
knowledge. If your actions are successful in helping you reach your goal, you
learn from that experience about what works well in practice. If you are
unsuccessful, you also learn from that experience –this time about what does not work in
practice.” (pp. 157-158). This action learning mechanism is very similar to the design approach to organizational research that I have promoted elsewhere (Andriessen, 2003, 2004) as an alternative to scientific management research that can bridge the gap between ‘rigor’ and ‘ relevance’. Cavaleri and Seivert extent this idea to knowledge development in organizations and connect it to the philosophy of pragmatism. A second reason I like this book is because of the distinction it makes between the Commissar and the Yogi. The book contains a self-test that you can use to see whether you think and act like a Commissar, who believes that organizations are like machines that need to be fine-tuned, or like a Yogi, who believes organizations are complex systems that are best understood by reflection and listening to the different perceptions of various members. It turn out I am a Yogi; even more then 95% of the population. This will come as no surprise to anybody that has read Making Sense of Intellectual Capital (Andriessen, 2004) or my papers on metaphor. Challenge: I would have liked to see more attention to the role of metaphor in our conceptualization of the world, including our conceptualization of knowledge. Their justified critique on conventional knowledge management that is aimed at “squeezing more juice from the lemon” is for example a disapproval of the uncritical use of the KNOWLEDGE AS A RESOURCE metaphor in KM literature (Andriessen, 2005). Metaphors are not just a matter of language; they are the basis for our understanding. Metaphors are always limited in that they highlight certain aspects and ignore others, yet they are unavoidable in any abstract reasoning about the world, including our reasoning about knowledge. When I confronted Steven Cavaleri with this he replied: “As to your view that the book does not adequately address the value of metaphors, that is correct and true because the position of the Yogi, vis-à-vis, Arthur Koestler is that all metaphors are limited, distortional, and potentially misleading. In the Peircian and Pragmatic view, we take the position that whatever the world is, at its core, may only be known through a series of actions, experimentations, and reflections. This is not to say that there is some known world that corresponds in some way to one view of reality, but rather, there is some order in the world, that can become revealed, over time, through actions and the lessons of their results.” I completely agree with Steven that the world may best be known by action, experimentation and reflection and that there is some order in the world that can become revealed thought actions and lessons. I would suggest that people use metaphors to conceptualize their actions and lessons to understand this order. Metaphor unconsciously plays a dominant role in any reflection about the world. There is no other way to create sense, so the Yogi better accept this, not ignore it.
Create: It may be useful to introduce a third character in
addition to the Commissar and the Yogi and I suggest we call it the
Innkeeper. While the Commissar gains knowledge through Information and
the Yogi creates knowledge through Intellect, the Innkeeper learns
mainly through the third i: Interaction. In (Tissen et al., 2000) I
have introduced these three i’s as the building blocks of knowledge: information,
interaction, and intellect. Notes: Andriessen, D. (2003) Intellectual capital research: rigor or relevance; a discourse on the scientific foundations of the IC movement. Presented at the 6th World Congress on Intellectual Capital, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Andriessen, D. (2005), On the metaphorical nature of intellectual capital: A textual analysis, paper presented at the 4th Critical Management Society conference, 4-6 July 2005, Cambridge, UK. Tissen, R., Andriessen, D., and Lekanne Deprez, F. (2000) The knowledge dividend: creating high-performance companies through value-based knowledge management. London: Financial Times Prentice Hall. |
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Title: Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999), Philosophy in the flesh, Basic Books, New York. Clarify: We talk about “sharing knowledge”, “developing knowledge”, “ packaging knowledge”, “selling knowledge” and it seems to make sense to somebody else. The reason is that we are very familiar with concepts like sharing, developing, packaging, and selling from the physical world of resources. What happens when we talk about knowledge in this way is that we unconsciously apply the KNOWLEDGE AS A RESOURCE metaphor and map characteristics of a physical resource (e.g. that it can be shared, developed, packaged and sold) to the concept of knowledge. We do this all the time and we can hardly escape from it. We do it when we talk about time (“I don’t have enough time”); we do it when we talk about love (“give me all your love”); we use metaphors whenever we conceptualize abstract concepts. So metaphor is crucial in the way we construct reality. Recently I made this breathtaking discovery reading a fabulous book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999): Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. This book puts an end to more then 2000 years of epistemological and ontological discussions about what is reality and how can we know it. Say goodbye to Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Kant, Popper etc. We now finally know that people construct reality, using conceptualizations that are mostly based on metaphors that come from our bodily experiences. As a result the correspondence theory of truth is false, the folk theory that things have an ‘essence’ is false (so don’t ever ask me again what the definition of ‘knowledge’ is; ask me what useful conceptualizations of knowledge are), and the idea is falls that we understand things by simply naming them correctly. This is not to say that ‘ everything goes’. It is still possible to check if some statement is true, providing that we define truth as ‘ the degree to which something is successful in practice’. This is also not to say that people are not able to understand each other. On the contrary, because we all have similar bodily experiences, we can very well understand each other using metaphorical conceptualizations. Challenge: I am not (yet) in the position to challenge this Magnus opus… Create: Managers and management researchers use the ideas of Lakoff and Johnson to investigate how metaphors shape the way we view organizations and the impact this has on the way we organize and lead them. Analyzing the language that is used can reveal underlying conceptualizations of the organization that unconsciously determine perception and action. A manager may talk about coaching leadership and the importance of intrinsic motivation, analyses of his wording may reveal he unconsciously thinks about the organization as a machine and of employees as resources. |
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Title: Andriessen, D. (2006), “On the metaphorical nature of intellectual capital: A textual analysis”, Journal of Intellectual Capital, Special issue: ‘Becoming Critical’ Vol 7 No 1, Guest Eds., David O’Donnell, Lars Bo Henriksen & Sven C. Voelpel. Clarify: I don’t recommend it because I wrote it but because it is the first paper to discuss the metaphorical nature of the concept of intellectual capital. Challenge: I invite you to challenge it…..send me an email Create: My next article should explore the consequences of the metaphorical nature of intellectual capital and provide some useful alternatives to the KNOWLEDGE AS A RESOURCE and the KNOWLEDGE AS CAPITAL metaphors. |
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Title: Van Aken, J. (2004). Management Research Based on the Paradigm of the Design Sciences: The Quest for Field-Tested and Grounded Technological Rules, Journal of Management Studies 41:2 March 2004. Clarify: Scientific research in the area of organizations and management does not have to be abstract and theoretical, it can be fun and practical. That was the clear message that I got reading the work of Prof. Dr. Joan van Aken. His design approach is aimed at creating prescriptive knowledge in a scientific way. Challenge: The design approach has mainly be used to design interventions that are based on a systems approach to organizations. When we view organizations using the metaphor of a system it becomes possible to design interventions that change elements of the systems or the relationships between them. However, this metaphor has its limits. For example, it tends to ignore the role of language and sense making. It ignores the fact that organizations are social constructions. As a result, organizations may not be as ‘designable’ as they may seem to be. Is it possible to design methods to change organizations? How changeable are organizations? How effective can planned and designed interventions be? Create: The design approach can however also be used in a different way. It can be used to design interventions in the sense making processes of actors. For example, we can design ways to help managers adopt a different perspective and see their organization in a new light. In fact that is what we often do when we talk to managers about intellectual capital. We provide them with a new vocabulary and a new way of looking at their business. That me be the biggest contribution of the IC perspective. |
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Title: Andriessen, D. (2004) Making sense of intellectual capital: designing a method for the valuation of intangibles. Burlington: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. ISBN: 0-7506-7774-0 Clarify: I don’t recommend it because I have written it myself, but because Van Aken uses it as an example of design research done the proper way. Challenge: You challenge me on my research methodology. Create: I intend to use the design methodology in many more of my projects. |
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If you know a book I must read, please email me. |
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