When you’ve soaked up all the information you can hold..

When you’ve soaked up all the information you can hold, you will have to forget half of it before you will be any real use.

If there’s anything worse than knowing too little, it is knowing too much.

Education will broaden a narrow mind, but there’s no known cure for a big head.

Poverty never spoils a good man, but prosperity often does.

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The Division of Knowledge Work

Most managers and owners of manufacturing plants and labor driven workforces might be familiar with the principles discussed in the ‘division of labour’ chapter of Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations.’ Just to remind ourselves, it reads a little something like this:

1. A pin maker, unknowing of the concepts of division of labour can very best make one pin per day by themselves.

2. Dividing the labor of making a pin involves a system where:

“One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head. To make the head requires two or three distinct operations… etc etc etc.”

3. “In some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.”

4. Employing this division of labour, a team of 10 pin makers can make up to 4800 pins per day.

Now let’s take this concept and bring it into our modern industry, where each of us is applying our knowledge to perform our job and this knowledge is exploited to produce wealth for our given nation. Should we divide our knowledge based work? Should we be fearful of knowledge workers from lower cost countries taking our jobs? Or do we learn to adapt and become orchestrators of low-cost (but still good quality) knowledge? Let’s think about it.

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More lessons from literature

[This side of paradise. The egotist becomes a parsonage] F. Scott Fitzgerald

“If you’d have gone to college you’d have been struck by the fact that the men there would work twice as hard for any one of a hundred petty honors as those other men did who were earning their way through.”

“The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long we’ve forgotten there’s any other way. We’ve made a world where that’s necessary. Let me tell you” — “If there were ten men insured against either wealth or starvation, and offered a green ribbon for five hours’ work a day an a blue ribbon for ten hours’ work a day, nine out of ten of them would be trying for the blue ribbon.”

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• Who am I? Where am I Going?

Grains of Sand

I woke up today with this thought in my mind.

If our existence is nothing but a grain of sand in relation to the history of the universe. Then what happens if we all work together effectively?

We might just be able to create something awesome; if just only for a finite moment:

Sand is awesome if it works together effectively!

Original image from: http://digital-tech-guide.blogspot.com/2007/06/pics-sand-art-part-3.html

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Where Shall We Live and Work?

This was written in 1997 by Leif Edvinsson and Michael Malone. Nice musings on how our 21st century would be, but how much of it is actually true? Has everyone rushed to the cool places?

“… the twenty-first century will see radical changes in where and how people live. In particular, the combination of powerful information technologies will make it possible for people to live and work anywhere and still enjoy most of the fruits of life in a big city or suburbia or the countryside— from culture and the arts to role-playing and simulated participation in distant world events.”

“These same technologies will also make work more and more portable, shifting jobs from centralized work sites to virtual offices located at home or on the road or in neighborhood centers”

“If we can live and work anywhere, where shall we live and work?”

“… in one of life’s bigger ironies, freedom always brings with it new responsibilities. Faced with this infinite choice of how and where to live and work, what will we choose? Will everyone race to the cities, or to the countryside? Will mountain and seaside resorts suddenly swell with new year-round residents? …”

Extracts from ‘Intellectual Capital: The proven way to establish your company’s real value by measuring its hidden brainpower. Leif Edvinsson and Michael S. Malone’

From a personal standpoint. I’d still rather live in the city where everything is convenient and it is easy to set up meetings with people (face to face communication is always the best!). The other voice inside me is telling me to go and live in the countryside where it is nice and quiet and it is fertile ground for my own creative thoughts.

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Who am I? Where am I Going?

It might seem a bit cliché to begin this knowledge management blog with the story of the rich man who wanders into the forest. I would love to mention it but my good friend Samuel has beaten me to it and also saved me the trouble with posting it at his blog.

So let’s cut to the chase instead. Who am I? At this moment in time it might be easy to provide what Antoine de Saint Exupery might consider ‘metrics for grown-ups’ such as my age, my education and my life experience so far but I shan’t bore the reader with such trivialities. Rather, I wish to tell you, reader, that I am now in the cyclic process of discovering and re-discovering, every day, exactly who I am and would pose the philosophic question back to you too. Who are you? Are you your job? Do you do what you love or love what you do? Do you think therefore you are? What matters to you most deeply and where have you come from? Do you exercise true wisdom when you make your decisions by taking into consideration the thoughts of others? Maybe you are well on your way to true enlightenment or you might have forgotten where you’ve come from and need to just stop for a moment and do some realignment? I’d love to know. Just to highlight here, it was Bob Marley who explored this in both Exodus and Buffalo Solider; from which I quote “We know where were going, We know where we’re from.” It was also Sun Zi, or ‘Sun Tzu’ to us Westerners, who taught us that knowing yourself is half the battle won. He also said that knowing our enemy would be the other half of the battle. So who might our enemy be? Perhaps the greatest enemy of man is knowledge and more decisively the lack of it. Knowledge may bring us closer to God or whomever our chosen religion seeks refuge in.

My ‘who am I’ definition might call upon the knowledge I have gained from my little experience on this planet, but alas, I’ve finally re-rooted myself and settled back into my old way of thinking that that the more I know, the less I know. Not in a negative connotation at all, but in the most beautiful one that has opened up my thirst for knowledge even more. After all, a little education might be a dangerous thing, but it is a great start if one sees it as a solid foundation for building upon.

Where am I going then if I know where I’ve come from? Even though it is more powerful for others to ask me this, I do ask this myself every day. Where am I going? Well that is exactly what this blog is all about. Where I am going right now is on a quest for knowledge and a deeper understanding of the world. You my dear reader are invited to join my along this quest and be my faithful aid and companion. Afterall, my good professor tells me that in the 21^st Century, knowledge is powerful, yes, but when knowledge is shared then that is where the real power starts to compound and flourish. Come, let us share knowledge and grow wiser together. I thank you for stumbling on this blog and stopping to read until this point. I hope it has been insightful and, naturally, your comments are more than welcome. Let the knowledge sharing begin!

Mark

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