The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation

Knowledge officers are also responsible for justifying the value of knowledge that is constantly being developed by the crew. They need to decide strategically which efforts to support and develop.

He insists that what executive management needs is not managerial theory, but rather a philosophy on how to guide an organization.

Middle managers usually have been portrayed in recent literature as frustrated, disillusioned, stuck in the middle of a hierarchy in dreary jobs (Johnson and Frohman, 1989) with little hope of career progression, and increasingly subject to being replaced by technological advancements (Dopson and Stewart, 1990).1 Doomsayers argue, according to Boru

They serve as the strategic “knot” that binds top management with front-line managers. They work as a “bridge” between the visionary ideals of the top and the often chaotic realities of business confronted by front-line workers. As we shall see later, they are the true “knowledge engineers” of the knowledge-creating company.

If companies will “train, train, train these knowledge workers, they will learn, learn, learn,” goes the popular thinking.

First, it gives rise to a whole different view of the organization—not as a machine for processing information but as a living organism.

In the West, where companies are laying off middle managers by the thousands, the very term “middle manager” has become almost a term of contempt, synonymous with “backwardness,” “stagnation,” and “resistance to change.” Yet we are arguing that middle managers are the key to continuous innovation. We disagree with the assessment of some of the lead

Samurai education placed a great emphasis on building up character and attached little importance to prudence, intelligence, and metaphysics. Being a “man of action” was considered more important than mastering philosophy and literature, although these subjects constituted a major part of the samurai’s intellectual education.25

Understanding how organizations create new products, new methods, and new organizational forms is important. A more fundamental need is to understand how organizations create new knowledge that makes such creations possible. This is the unfinished business that Herbert Simon has left for us. In the next chapter we will embark upon this challenging