It is
brought home to me every time I take a long flight (which is far more often
then anyone would like) how very few people read books and how very, very few
read serious books. Without descending too far into anecdotage, I can easily
remember taking flights where almost everyone was reading something or
other, often serious fiction or a business book, not something about clever
animals or eight bullets to change your firm. A few months ago I flew to
In any
case, I read all the time. I have done so since I was a mere lad, and I don't
see how anyone can hope to offer useful help to any organization without doing
so. It's one of the best investments in yourself you can make. Not the only
one, but one of the most sustaining.
In this
mode, let me alert you to three new books that have a real impact on many
aspects of working with knowledge and learning. Books like this don't come
along too often, and when they do they command attention.
The first is The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better
Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies by Scott
Page. I almost never use the term "revolutionary" in relation to a
book, but this book is just that. Page offers a rich and complex analysis
advocating cognitive diversity--the idea that a diverse team or group is likely
to produce a better output then a group composed of people with greater
expertise in the field but who have similar backgrounds, educations, outlooks,
etc. Instead of loading up your project team with more and more of the same MBAs
or engineers, try diversity! Add an anthropologist, a librarian, maybe a poet
or a painter. If the right incentives are in place, you will have a far better
shot at getting something innovative and/or something that works for you.
Needless to say, this isn't a book about gender or ethnic diversity, but rather
one about people who have real differences in the way they see and understand
the world.The
writing here is rich, but somewhat technical and often rough going. However,
you can get most of it by skimming the math and grasping the arguments in the
words. Believe me, this book will really change how you think about
collective knowledge.
Another interesting book is Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, two very public
intellectuals who are also well-known scholars of economics and law,
respectively. Nudge is a Libertarian
Paternalism manifesto. It argues for countries and organizations to develop
architectures of choice that "nudge" people towards useful and
healthy goals without actually forcing them to do things. The concept is a
"third way" between paternalistic types of choice structures in which
people must assent or pay a penalty and the "you're on your own"
ideas that we have gotten so used to lately.
The book
is smart, sometimes even funny, and always intelligent. In designing
information and knowledge systems, we are often torn between these two extremes
and feel we must choose between them. Nudge
offers an attractive alternative and one that we can all take advantage of.
The third
book is
Community, Economic Creativity, and Organization edited
by Ash Amin and Joanne Roberts. This fine volume is dedicated to the best
current thinking on communities of practice and includes chapters written by
some of the very people who helped invent this now-popular concept. The writing
can be academic, but many of the ideas about the value and use of organizing
around practices can be put into action without too much difficulty. At the
least you will find several new arguments and thoughts focused on knowledge and
learning from varied perspectives.
I should also mention a book that isn't quite so new, but is still very much worth reading: Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It's a very quirky and smart argument for the proposition that nobody knows anything and why that is so. Read it and find out why.
Editor's Note: A few months ago, one of our other KM Edge contributors, Capt. Ralph Soule, published a blog post entitled "Evaluating Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan." If you are interested in this book and would like more information about the argument it makes, I highly recommend revisiting Capt. Soule's analysis.
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