The tyranny of publishing

Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak, together with Don Cohen, started blogging some months ago on Babson Knowledge Blog and their inaugural post contains, among other reasons for blogging:

"there is a lot that doesn’t fit into a research paper format"

"Third, it’s a vehicle for getting some of our ideas into the world at large, without being subject to the tyranny of Harvard Business Review or Sloan Management Review editors."

I havent so far encountered anyone who blamed not being published on the tyranny of the journals. Also the tyranny must have taken over HBR and Sloan as recently as 2003 as Davenport and Prusak had quite a few articles in HBR and quite a few in Sloan as well between 1989 and 2002.

In the latest entry on Babson Knowledge Blog Tom Davenport describes the recent KM World conference:

... it was something of a “dog’s breakfast,” as Larry Prusak would say, in terms of content. There were sessions on intranets and blogging and streaming media and communities of practice—you name it, somebody was presenting on it. I suppose one could go all negative and say that this is evidence of a lack of focus for KM, but I think it’s actually pretty positive. We have an amazingly wide variety of tools today to work with. The key, of course, is to understand what tools correspond to what knowledge problems and issues, and to understand the work that your organization’s knowledge workers perform.

(Found via Jack Vinson and subsequently Steve Matthews)