Blogging Alone: Knowledge Leadership is an Intrinsically Social Activity Knowledge workers in the information age no longer just work to attain one goal; instead they must perpetually process information and solve unexpected problems that quickly arise. Blogging Alone explores how today knowledge and learning have become the new strategic imperative of organizations economic life. What is knowledge leadership really about? When information becomes more freely available it becomes advantages to share it more freely.
From this article you will devlope a better understanding of the knowledge economy, and the social capital which makes it thrive. What you learn is central to understanding the broader economic situation of the formation of social capital from web logs. According to Tom Stewart, editor of Fortune magazine, knowledge has become the most important factor of economic life: it is the chief ingredient of what we buy and sell; it is the raw material with which we work. As executives and corporate leaders absorb the simple truth they find they must completely change the way they think about the organization, business relationships, measures, tools, business models, values, ethics, culture and leadership. In short ?It changes everything?.
Dan Holtshouse from Xerox claims(pdf), ?managing for knowledge means creating a thriving work and learning environment that fosters the continuous creation, aggregation, use and re-use of both organizational and personal knowledge? in the pursuit of new business value.? Knowledge workers use problem-solving strategies to mobilize resources available to them in order to resolve problems. Resources enable those who possess them, and limit those who do not: relative distribution of resources are essential for understanding the different problem solving strategies employed by people in different social-economic groups. Resources are everywhere, unevenly distributed, with patterns of inequality varying across social networks or communities of practice. Value creation in knowledge work revolves around the daily struggle to identify, articulate and solve problems.
Knowledge and learning are intrinsically social activities. The social interactions are fundamental processes in the value creation process where workers simultaneously produce and consume knowledge and learning for each other. At any given time the problem solving strategies utilized depend upon both the problem and the resources available. Pattern responses to distinctive sets of problems, called ?frameworks? or ?tool kits,? evolve over time to create features that distinguish one community of practice from another.
Because social and material resources can be mobilized to solve problems, they are often described as capital, or means of storing universal value that can be transferred to other settings. Four forms of capital come to mind at this time.
Financial capital, the most liquid form, includes money in cash or access to budget including other interments such as stocks and investments. There are few problems that can not be solved given access to enough finical capital.
Physical capital includes all possessions that enable people to solve problems, that would either bring money if sold or that would cost money to replace like your computer and network access. Physical capital is the most visible of all forms of capital and plays an important role in communicating ones place in society.
Human capital is the skills and the knowledge acquired by an individual including education, training and work experience. Human capital is often communicated in credentials like college degrees or professional certifications. These credentials help others rapidly evaluate the stock of human capital in strangers but are not always an accurate assessment. Some categories under humane capital are intellectual capital, skills capital, and local knowledge or ?street smarts?.
Social capital describes the connections between people that allow other resources to flow among people. Unlike the other forms of capital mentioned above, social capital is not characteristic of one individual but rather is embodied in the relationship among people. Network structure determines a person?s access to other resources, including goods, assistance, and information.
In a market economy, financial capital becomes the universal medium for problem solving strategies. In a knowledge economy, social capital becomes the universal medium for problem solving strategies. When financial capital becomes scarce, obtaining goods and services requires mobilizing far more social capital than finical capital. In a study conducted in the city of Novisiberisk(pdf), post soviet economies where characterized by scarcity in the financial capital and abundant of social capital left over from a soviet state controlled network of relationships. It was learned that people combine other forms of capital in unique combination to accomplish what they would have more efficiently achieved with cash. The problems in daily life do not go away just because the financial capital vanished. One thing about the human condition is their resourcefulness in solving problems under rapidly changing conditions. One thing about work in the information age is the abundance of new problems.
Out here at the edge of the information economy there is very little access to financial capital. In problem-solving strategies one form of capital must often be combined with another form to transform it to a third. Access to available options is fundamental for maximizing an individual?s household utility. At times the information economy approaches the model of the true market, the more it is dependent on social ties for its effective functioning. The information economy plays a role in the every day lives of individuals in all social classes and any industrial society, and social capital plays a role in many uses of the information economy. The challenge at the edge is for information sellers to transform their time, skills, and local knowledge of the market into the extra capital resources they need in order to solve tomorrow?s problems.
Understanding the information economy, and the social capital which makes it possible, is truly central to understanding the broader economic situation in web logs and beyond. The informal economy of information workers is prevalent in part because of low barriers to entry, enabling cash poor workers at the edge to solve their problems without high outlays of finical capital. Transactions at the edge are conversations and exchanges of information ideas all taking up the limited time of each person. At the edge there is an abundance of access to information and social exchanges and a shortage of access to financial capital and a shortage of time that each person needs to maintain the health of their social network.
The way to take advantage of this asymmetric condition is not to push financial capital to the edge but rather increase the amount of social capital available to information workers at the edge. Give them tools to communicate faster with each other, like instant messenger applications. Provide them with information consumption tools like news aggregators (FM Radio with enhanced SocialDynamX) that reduce the cost of information consumption. Provide them with information production and transition tools like web logs that greatly increase ones ability to maintain important week social ties. In this shortage economy people will find new ways to combine their social capital with their human capital located at the edge. These changes will lead to the creation of more finical capital for the corporations that do so first.
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