What knowledge is?
Knowledge unlike information, is about beliefs and commitment. Knowledge is a function of a particular stance, perspecetive, or intention. Second, knowledge, unlkike information, is about action.
They take the notion of knowledge as justified true belief more so on the justified where they argue Western ideals would be more focused on the truth.
Knowledge is created from information flow.
Two Dimensions of Knowledge Creation
Polanyi contends that human beings create knowledge by involving themselves with objects To know something is to create its image or pattern by tacitly integrating particulars. In or der to understand the pattern as a meaningful whole, it is necessary to integrate one’s body with the particulars.
They include more practical elements like Johnson-laird ‘mental models’
Knowledge Creation
@coates The notion here, is how to create organizational knowledge. The why of that I think is related to why we have ‘firms’ in the first place something tackled by Coates in his ‘Theory of Firms’. In the case of why we dont just all operate freelance and let markets dictate efficient use of resources.
According to Ronald Coase’s essay The Nature of the Firm, people begin to organise their production in firms when the transaction cost of coordinating production through the market exchange, given imperfect information, is greater than within the firm.
Just before the case study, its probably important to get some context. I don’t really think Japanese companies are unique in some way like that described in the book. This is based on reading ‘How Asia Works’ where a lot of skill development in Japan came from overseas. Where I have no prior is further development on that knowledge. Also, these practices might be so normalised now (in the whole evolutionary business strategy sense) that it seems unsurprising.
Case study: Matsushita
By 1977, a the household appliance market (where Matsushita specialized) was saturated. Most people had access to TV’s, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, the were just replacing them. This meant that profits were stagnating. You need to make less and less of your products every year until eventually, profits dwindle and your company shrinks in size. Its interesting that to maintain price competitiveness required some scale and that if you’d to shrink you might just go bankrupt.
Also, other developing nations were industrialising and providing low cost competition.
The slogan to improve core business competitiveness and assembling resources necessary to enter new markets became
”Beyond Household Appliances”
They started by taking three divisions whose markets were maturing into a general Cooking Appliances Division. The hope was to make a new hot product using the knowledge of all the integrated divisions. The initial issue was creating a common ‘language’. They did this with the creation of a newspaper for factory workers. The hope was to disseminate knowledge from all divisions to everybody. The key here being redundancy (the idea that knowledge needs to be shared that may not be needed immediately) invading peoples boundaries providing new perspectives and information.
Think about this even in a personal growth sense, getting sources of information from a range of relevant areas can provided inspiration and ‘creative chaos’ but it starts with no real intention in mind for what you’re consuming, kind of just swimming in the information for a bit.
So they had their company intention from the previous slogan but they needed a divisional intention. In the 80’s they went to scout out the daily lives of Americans. They saw that their diets were poor and that people weren’t at home as often (more women entering the workforce), they generated the slogan “Easy and Rich” where rich is nutritional and tasty.
The first cycle
Initially, a head designer came up with an ideal for what the bread maker should do. Rather than focus on technical feasibility. The union of several teams on working together created an environment where the general question of what home baking was to them could thrive. They shared tacit knowledge about this and tried to embody it in their designs.
It was general guided by the intention though, that its easy and rich. This first cycle resulted in a product that really didn’t meet the criteria at all but people were on the same general ‘page’.
Second cycle
This is when an engineer Ikuko Tanaka worked with a master baker trying to gain the tacit knowledge required to imbue richness in their product. After some time she developed the notion that twist and stretch was key, another externalization (analogy) that was communicated. Over a year of trial and error they developed a machine that captured this and materialized it into product specifications.
The overall goal here was to knead the dough correctly, to justify the concept against the notion of rich. Through socialization Tanaka gained knowledge about how to do this and tried to use analogous phrases to externalize this concept to engineers, this eventually resulted in things like lining special ribs inside the dough case. The combination of knowledge was to aggregation of what the engineers were doing with Tanaka’s ‘vision’. This resulted in a prototype that met the ‘Rich’ intention.
The final stage was to reduce costs and this was done through the ‘Chumen’ method which reduced the need for temperature control (not too clear on the details). They then faced pressures as market expected release would have to be delayed but ultimately stuck to their initial intention stance.
It kind of feels like the squeezing of terms ‘socialization’ and externalization onto some things after the fact. It’s hard to say how deterministic the processes of socialization were to generating new ideas.
Whats interesting here is how it shifted engineer thinking
The success of Home Bakery changed the engineers’ attitudes toward new projects. Their experience brought confidence and a desire among Matsushita employees to develop another innovative product. Prior to Home Bakery, engineers developed products to compete within the company. After its introduction, the focus shifted to creating products with genuine quality that met real consumer needs. In addition, engineers started to investigate the desires of consumers when developing concepts. Sano said, “By asking what dreams people have in their daily lives and how they realize them, we can get to the next break through.
This is interesting in light of Austin Vernon’s software productivity post where businesses are made to fit the software rather than the other way round.
Epistemology
This book opens with a general history of Western epsitomology vs Japanese epsitomology where western ideas are associated with knowledge embodied in objects. The deterministic nature of objects and the sepeartion of our minds from those objects.
the Japanese had failed to build up a rational thought of clear universality, because they did not succeed in the separation and objectification of self and nature
They say that the japanese see the flow of time as a constantly updating present. Many Japanese novels not having any fixed time point and poems free from time perspective.
Later also noting that the Japanese language itself has a seperateness from individuality
The ambiguous nature of the Japanese language thus asks one to be equipped with some tacit knowledge of each context.
The notion of the ‘public’ and private person not being the same in Japan, that ‘you and I are two sides of the same coin’.
Knowledge in Management theories
Hayek
The economic problem of soiety is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources.. it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality.
The authors argue here mainly with the notions of knowledge creation, thats its not really discussed in western thought just exists and is manipulated. They say that Hayek ends up with a ‘static’ view of knowledge that just needs to be utilised.
A lot of this management history goes over my head but I think the codification and view of the employee as an information processing unit is dominant. The move to get rid of rules of thumb in business in the early 20th century is counteracted by the importance of ‘human relations’. Chester Barnard tries to synthesise it with
the essence of the ‘problem of organizing’ according to Barnard, is to transform the actors who strategically pursue mutually conflicting goals into a rational cooperative system.
For Simon, implicit knowledge was nothing more than ‘noise’. The logical content being more important than ‘values’ and ‘meaning’.
In addition, Simon viewed the organization’s relation to its environment as passive. He argued that the business organization reacts to the environment mainly by adjusting the information-processing structure. What he missed was the proactive aspect of the organization’s action on the environment.
Moving on to organisational culture and the development of the knowledge worker (by Drucker), that knowledge is central to an organization.
The organization has to be prepared to abandon knowledge that has become obsolete and learn to create new things through: (1) continuing improvement of every activity; (2) development of new applications from its own successes; and (3) continuous innovation as an organized process. Drucker (1991) also points out that an organization has to raise productivity of knowledge and service workers in order to meet the challenge
First, the socialization mode usually starts with building a ‘field’ of interaction. This field facilitates the sharing members’ experiences and mental models. Second, the externalization mode is triggered by meaningul ‘fialogues or collection flection’ in which using appropriate metaphor or analogy helps team members to articulate hidden tacit knowledge that is otherwise hard to communicate. Third, the combination mode is triggered by ‘netowrking’ newly created knowledge and existing knowledge from other sections of the organizatoin theby crystallizing them into a a new product, service or managerial syste.