The Human Condition Have Failed - Assignment Example

PART ONE Q In building structured capital, illustrate how we get knowledge out of people's heads and into a computer, a process, a document, or another's organizational asset. ANSWER: A fundamental transformation to a global information and knowledge economy is underway, driven by dramatic changes in technologies, markets and government policies For the future, increased investment in human capital, and in access to education and training institutions is essential. The next generation Internet will make possible expanded educational networks and the global sharing of university resources. The industrial economy of the 20thcentury is being transformed into an information and knowledge economy. This is changing the character of local, national and international economic, social, cultural and political activity. The idea of "capital" is a central concept of capitalism, the overwhelmingly dominant economic system in the world today. It is revealing to view knowledge through the different lenses of "know what," "know who," "know how," "know why," "know where," "know when," and "know if": Know What: knowledge management, knowledge management systems, information structure, semantics, e-learning Know Who: networks, authorities, individuals, practitioners, collaboration Know How: networking, consulting, collaborating, sharing, researching, reflecting, developing, testing, maintaining, doing, learning, educating, training, innovating, managing, navigating Know Why: context, business planning, strategy, reasons to learn Know Where: where-to, where-from,strategic positioning, planning, reflecting Know When: timing, pacing, planning, scheduling, context, just-in-time Know If: scenarios, scenario development,foresight, contingency, just-incase REFERENCE David Alberts, John Garstka, and Frederick Stein, Network Centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority, Washington D.C.: Department of Defense, CCRP Publication Series Q: 2 In the past, people believed that "knowledge is power" and they sometimes used such knowledge to "build empire that resulted in isolated, dysfunctional organizational units. In the new knowledge-sharing environment, illustrate how this tendency to hoard knowledge and expertise could be minimized or eliminated ANSWER To me our knowledge of the way things work, in society or in nature, comes trailing clouds of vagueness. Vast ills have followed a belief in certainty, whether historic inevitability, grand diplomatic designs, or extreme views on economic policy. When developing policy with wide effects for an individual or society, caution is needed because we cannot predict the consequences. The development of ways to deal with complex systems is now taking place in many disciplines, but slowly and not without controversy. Complexity theories fell into some disrepute when some management "gurus" tried to map complex adaptive system theories onto business management and market trading strategies - with less than successful results for investors. It now seems likely that the level of similarity in adaptation strategies between, say, populations of sharks and populations of stock-market day-traders is less than some have "seen." But the broad outlines of all complex systems appear to be tantalizingly analogous and can give us some clues for new things to try - even if we cannot predict in advance that these things will work just like they do in other systems. REFERNCE Alexander Kouzmin and Alan Jarman, "Crisis Decision Making: Towards a Contingent Decisions Path Perspective," in Uriel Rosenthal, Michael T.Charles, and Paul T. Hart, eds., Coping With Crisis: The Management of Disasters, Riots and Terrorism, Springfield IL: Charles C. Thomas Publishers, pp. 397-435 Q: 3 Although it is legal to discover trade secrets through reverse engineering, evaluate whether or not it really should be illegal. ANSWER: Because reverse engineering can be used to reconstruct source code, it walks a fine line in intellectual property law. Many software license agreements strictly forbid reverse engineering. Software companies fear (and rightly so) that their trade secret algorithms and methods will be more directly revealed through reverse engineering than they are through external machine observation. However, there is no general-purpose law against reverse engineering. Because reverse engineering is a crucial step in removing copy protection schemes, there is some confusion regarding its legality. Patching software to defeat copy protection or digital rights management schemes is illegal. Reverse engineering software is not. If the law changes and reverse engineering is made illegal, then a serious blow will be dealt to the common user of software (especially the common and curious user). A law completely outlawing reverse engineering would be like a law making it illegal to open the hood of your car to repair it. Under such a system, car users would be required by law to go to the dealership for all repairs and maintenance. REFERNCE Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, New York: Basic Books PART 2 Q: 1 Assess Senge's premise that learning is the only sustainable competitive advantage. ANSWER: Learning and change are inextricably linked. When we learn, things change, and when things change we need to learn. There are few who would not accept that we are living in an increasingly complex and ever changing world. In practice the Learning Organisation is characterised by: An acceptance of mistakes as a valuable and essential part of learning (breaking down the culture of blame.) A growing sense of personal and mutual responsibility (leading to increasing transparency and accountability). Participative processes - where dialogue, exploration and a climate of mutual value and respect prevail. Empowerment - building the capacity of members to analyse the problems they face, identify effective solutions and develop sustainable responses. The Learning Organisation describes an ongoing, systemic process rather than a single product. It is about building sustainable processes of individual and collective development in the workplace as a means of increasing organisational capacity and effectiveness. Learning Organisations are shaped by a combination of formal and informal strategies: Individual and group participatory processes, commitment and relationships Formal training and other human development resources REFERNCE James R. Chiles, Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge of Technology, New York: Harper Business (2001). Q: 2 To which view, either external or internal, does Senge refer when he discusses a shared vision. Illustrate your answer with an example. ANSWER: What does it mean to have a shared vision A shared vision begins with the individual, and an individual vision is something that one person holds as a truth. Throughout history there are many examples of people who have had a strong vision, some of these people are remembered even today. One example is John Brown with his vision of a holy war to free the slaves, which culminated in his attack on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. According to Carl Jung, "Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.... Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." (Mindscape, 1995) The shared vision of an organization must be built of the individual visions of its members. What this means for the leader in the Learning Organization is that the organizational vision must not be created by the leader, rather, the vision must be created through interaction with the individuals in the organization. Only by compromising between the individual visions and the development of these visions in a common direction can the shared vision be created. The leader's role in creating a shared vision is to share her own vision with the employees. This should not be done to force that vision on others, but rather to encourage others to share their vision too. Based on these visions, the organization's vision should evolve. What is a shared vision To come up with a classification for shared visions would be close to impossible. Going back to the definition of a vision as a graphic and lifelike mental image that is very important to us, Melinda Dekker's drawing [see p. 2] is as good as any other representation of shared vision. The drawing will probably be interpreted differently by people, but still there is something powerful about the imagery that most people can see. Reflection on shared vision brings the question of whether each individual in the organization must share the rest of the organization's vision. The answer is no, but the individuals who do not share the vision might not contribute as much to the organization. How can someone start to share the rest of the organization's vision Senge (1990) stresses that visions can not be sold. For a shared vision to develop, members of the organization must enroll in the vision. The difference between these two is that through enrollment the members of the organization choose to participate. REFERNCE Peter Schwartz, Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence, New York: Gotham Books Q: 3 If an organization reorganizes with a focus on processes rather than functions, and process owners have end-to-end responsibilities for their processes, assess the magnitude of risk to the organization and its knowledge management plans should one of these individuals decide to leave the company ANSWER: The essential building blocks of a Learning Organisation. Given that much of what appears in the first four will already be familiar, it is the use of the fifth discipline - systemic thinking - in each of the others that is most important. It is in applying them all together that the Learning Organisation takes shape. The five disciplines Personal mastery Mental models Shared vision Team learning Systems thinking 1. PERSONAL MASTERY This is where the organisation focuses on the individual's ability to create and adapt to change. Senge believes that organisations cannot begin to learn unless individuals learn. The model suggests that individuals do have a vision of where they want to be in life, and that from this personal vision comes their desire to make changes. 2. MENTAL MODELS Mental models are ways of looking at the world, they describe our cognitive processes and how these determine the way we act and think. This discipline encourages the use of reflection and enquiry skills to develop awareness of the attitudes, beliefs, values and perceptions that shape and determine our thoughts, actions and interaction with others 3. SHARED VISION A shared vision is not the description of a desirable end point - like the picture of a dish alongside the recipe in a cookery book - but is the pattern of values, aspirations, competencies and culture of an organisation. The value of a shared vision is in its power to generate mutual commitment and purpose among members through developing shared images of: The future they seek to create The principles that will shape it and The practices through which they will achieve it together 4. TEAM LEARNING Most organisational development thinking recognises the importance of teams and Senge considers them the key learning unit of an organisation. Empowered teams have great abilities to transform collective thinking, and to mobilise energies and actions to achieve common goals. 5. SYSTEMS THINKING The model suggests that effective teams are built on the disciplines of personal mastery, mental models and shared vision - the extent to which they combine as an effective organisation is the extent to which each of these disciplines is rooted in a systemic approach. The systemic approach adopted by Senge, described as the fifth discipline, maintains that understanding an organisation depends less on detailing the nature and function of its parts than on how these interact as a whole in pursuit of the organisations' purpose. This holistic approach challenges more traditional, mechanistic ways of looking at organisations and their ways of implementing and reacting to change. REFERNCE James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press: New Haven and London Read More