Thinking for a living by Thomas H. Davenport

I had not noticed the book announcement on the Gurteen newsletter and was therefore very grateful to find it on the blog A Compound of Alchymie and I did like bloghost John Curran did and ordered it straight away.

I never made it beyond chapter 3. From the announcement and the first 40 pages I had expected break-through stuff on measuring knowledge, innovation and such. I had expected that a book with the sentence "How to get better performance and Results" on the cover would actually contain a good deal of knowledge on measuring and managing performance of knowledge workers and not just common places like "A laissez-faire approach to knowledge work wont lead to improved performance and results" under the heading "Recommendations for Getting Results from Knowledge Workers". This was the last sentence I read in the book.

The most useful book - in terms of concrete measures for KM - I have read thus far, is still the 2004 book Strategy Maps: Converting intangible assets into tangible outcomes by Kaplan and Norton which provides very interesting insight into measuring intangibles in general and some good and practical examples on measuring knowledge as well.

BTW - another entry on A Compound of Alchymie is pointing to the checkershadow illusion. Have a look to see how our brain sometimes fools us (the assumption is that square A and B on the picture to the left are the same colour and the evidence can be found here)