- Only material things are real.A great deal of our efforts focus
on trying to make invisible “things” (like knowledge, commitment,
trust, and relationships) assume material form. We believe we have
accomplished this when we assign numbers to them. (This belief
combines with the next one.) - Only numbers are real.(This belief is ancient, dating back to
the sixth century B.C.) Once we assign a number to something (a
grade in school; a performance index; a statistic), we relax and feel
we have adequately described what’s going on. (These two beliefs
reinforce the next.) - You can only manage what you can measure.We use numbers
to manage everything: ROI, P-E ratios, inventory returns,
employee morale, staff turnover. If we can’t assign a number to it,
we don’t pay it any attention. To keep track of increasingly com-
plex measurements, we turn to our favorite new deity, which is the
next belief. - Technology is always the best solution.We have increasing
numbers of problems, which we try to solve using technology.
However, this reliance on technology actually only increases our
problems. We don’t notice that the numeric information we enter
in a computer cannot possibly describe the complexity of the expe-
rience or person we are trying to manage. By choosing computers
(and numbers) as our primary management tool, we set ourselves
up for guaranteed and repeated failures.
All of these beliefs show up strongly in knowledge manage-
ment. We’re trying to manage something—knowledge—that is
inherently invisible, incapable of being quantified, and borne in
relationships, not statistics. In addition, we are relying on technol-
ogy to solve our problems with KM—we focus on constructing the
right database and the most efficient storage and retrieval system
and assume we have KM solved.
The Japanese approach KM differently than we do in the West.
The differences in approaches expose these Western beliefs with
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