A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about knowledge management

摘要

This is the latest in the series of Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap books. Its topic is knowledge management. It is indeed very short. It can be read cover-to-cover within a few hours, and as all chapters are about 20 pages long, and written in an engaging, easily accessible style, they can be read individually in 20-30 minutes. For such a short book, it succeeds in giving a reasonably good overview of the academic topic of knowledge management. Each chapter is well focussed on a particular topic, and can be read as a self-contained, independent essay. The first three chapters give an introduction to foundational issues, including why knowledge management has become a popular topic, the academic discipline in which the topic is located, and how it links to the topics of information management and learning, and the nature of management, knowledge and knowledge management. The next three chapters are focussed on particular types of knowledge process that can be managed, the acquisition, transfer and retention of knowledge, innovation processes and the creation of knowledge, and the relatively neglected topics of ignorance, forgetting and unlearning.