Americans have the opposite challenge, which is how to share
individually gained knowledge with a group. For instance, during a
stay at Wharton, a student colleague solved this challenge cre-
atively: he removed all the chapters that we needed to read for the
next exam from the book. Nobody could get to that source. Thus,
it became clear that if one student is set against the other in com-
petition for grades, knowledge remains a relative concept.
Specific and Codified Versus Diffuse
and Implicit KnowledgeMany organizations have a treasure trove of implicit or “tacit”
knowledge, in the words of Nonaka and Takeuchi.^1 Their success
will depend on how this can be transferred into something
concrete, such as an explicit product. Nonaka and Takeuchi use
Matsushita’s development of the world’s first fully automated home
bakery machine as an example. When the inventors couldn’t fully
understand the mechanism for kneading the dough, one of their
software programmers was apprenticed to the top baker at the
Osaka International Hotel. Only after he had mastered the implicit
knowledge of dough kneading was he able to transfer this informa-
tion to his colleague engineers.
Americans have the mirror image of this experience. When
guiding the integration of the Japanese Isuzu truck division with
General Motors’ truck division, we noticed that the Americans
were quite upset by the Japanese. The Americans used about 30
percent of their time to codify and write up their knowledge in
handbooks and procedures. However, the knowledge of the Japan-
ese is stored in their network of relationships. Do you need any
written documents in your family to understand each other? The
Americans reacted to this situation by asking, “How can you
ever learn from each other and transfer that knowledge and expe-
rience if you don’t write it up?” We suggested explaining to the
Japanese how to write effective handbooks. Much shorter and effi-
cient manuals of explicit knowledge were the result. This is a very
different approach from “Shut up and listen.” The Americans had
FIVEDILEMMAS OFKNOWLEDGEMANAGEMENT 15