Corporate Instinct: Building a Knowing Enterprise for the 21st Century

Rating:
Summary: Excellent primer on enterprise Knowledge Management
Review: I've always had much respect for Tom Koulopoulos and the Delphi Group. But I expected going into this book that there would be a sales pitch embedded into the book of some sort. Not so.

The book is a very readable, very practical guide to enabling your organization to develop instict. What does "instinct" mean in the context of a business you ask? It means that when the market shifts, your company is structured in such a way that it can shift immediately to accomodate and exploit it. Rather than observing market changes and reacting to them retrospectively, you are there from the beginning.

To accomplish this, companies must balance their characteristics according to a grid of:

* INTERNAL AWARENESS

* EXTERNAL AWARENESS

* INTERNAL RESPONSIVENESS

* EXTERNAL RESPONSIVENESS

The book is all about the specifics of this grid and how you can acheive balance. At the end of the book is a very helpful Corporate Instinct Assessment test for use on your company.

For those who desire to put feet on KM theory, I recommend, as a start, reading "Corporate Instinct" and "The Character of a Corporation" (Goffee and Jones) together. The latter fills in many of the Cultural elements not treated in the former.