Perpustakaan Pusat LAN RI

Manajemen - pengetahuan

The roots of this book go back 12 years. We were asked by the late Professor William J. Abernathy to submit a paper for the 75 th Anniversary Colluquium ot the Harvard Business School on the unique features of the new product development process within Japanese companies. The ideas generated in that study became the basis for our 1986 Harvard Business Review article, :The New New Product Development Game", In that article, we used the "rugby" metaphor to describe the speed and flexibility with which Japanese companies developed new products as in rugby, the ball gets passed within the team as it moves up the field as a unit.
In retrospect, that study had touched on the roots of why japanese companies became successful in the 1970s and 1980s. Let's continue the rugby analogy and focus our attention on the "ball" to describe what we mean. The ball being passed around in the team contains a shared understanding of what the company stands for, where it is oing, what kind of a world it wants to live in, andd how to make that world a reality. Highly subjective insights, intuitions and hunches are also embraced. That's "what" the ball contains namely, ideals, values and emotions. Now, let's focus on "how" the ball gets passed around in rugby. Unlike how a baton gets passed from one runner to the next in a relay race, the ball does not move in any defined or structured manner. Unlike relay, it does not move linearly or sequentially. Ball movement in rugby is borne out of the team members' interplay on the field. It is determined on the spot ("here and now"), based on direct experienceand trial and error. It requires an intensive and laborious interaction among members of the team.
This interactive process is analogous to how knowledge is created organizationally within Japanese companies. As we shall see in this book, creating organizational knowledge is as much about bodily experience and trial and error as it is about mental modeling and learning from others. Similarly, it is as much about ideals as it is about ideas. We content in this book that Japanese companies have became successful because of their skills and expertise at "organizational knowledge creation". By organizational knowledge creation we mean the capability of a company as a whole to create new knowledge, disseminate it throughout the organization, and embody it in products, services, and systems. Here in lies the roots. Other theories of why Japanese companies have become successful abound, but our explanation hits at the most basic and universal component of the orgtanization human knowledge.
The study of human knowledgeis as old as human history itself. It has been a central subject matter of philosophy and epistemology since the Greek period. Knowledge has also begun to gain a new wave of attention in recent years. Not only socio-economic theorists such as Peter Drucker and Alvin Toffler call for our attention to the importance of knowledge as management resource and power, but aslo an increasing number of scholars in the fields of industrial organization, technology management, management strategy and organizational theory have begun to theorize about management of knowledge.
In this book, we take knowledge as the basi unit of analysis for explaining firm behavior. In discussing knowledge in the business organization, this book calls for a fundamental shift in thinking avbout what the business orgtanization does with knowledge. More specifically, this book starts from the belief that the business organization not merely "processes" knowledge but "reates" it as well. Knowledge ceration by the bussiness organization has been virtally neglected in management studies. Years of research on Japanese firms, however, convinces us that knowledge creation has been the most important source of their international competitiveness.
In this book, we classify human knowledge into two kinds. One is explicit knowledge, which can be articulated in formal language including grammatical statements, mathematical expressions, specifications, manuals and so forth. This kind of knowledge thus can be transmitted across individuals formally and easily. This has been the dominant mode of knowledge in the Western philosophical tradition. However, we shall aargue, a more important kind of knowledge is tacit knowledge, which is hard to articulate with formal language. It is personal knowledge embedded in individual experience and involves intangible factors such as personal belief, perspective and the value system. Tacit knowledge has been overlooked as a critical component of collective human behavior. At the same time, however, tacit knowledge is an important source of Japanese companies competitiveness. This is probably a major reason that Japanese management is seen as an enigma among Western people. In this book we focus on explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge as basic building blocks in a complementary relationship. More importantly, the interaction between these two forms of knowledge is the key dynamic of knowledge creation in the business organization. "Organizational knowledge creation" is a spiral process in which the above interaction takes place repeatedly. (Tp).