CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army
Profession
By Nancy M. Dixon, Nate Allen, Tony Burgess, Pete Kilner
and Steve Schweitzer, Center for the Advancement of Leader Development &
Organizational Learning, West Point, NY.
This is the
CompanyCommand story. It is about four, then soldiers, who saw a need to learn
from and share with their comrades and made it happen. What started as a
grassroots effort has become an inspiration to the rest of the U.S. Army. It is
a wonderful blend of inspiration and practical steps for how to make community
happen. In the words of COL Forseyth, Vice Dean for Education at West Point, "In
reading this book, you will be listening in on a conversation among
professionals. You'll see how they share, encourage, support, question, discover
and reason together."
Review
»
Read what General Sullivan says about
CompanyCommand
» Table
of Contents
» Battle
Lessons: What the generals don't know, January 2005 by Dan
Baum
Common
Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They
Know
By Nancy M. Dixon, Harvard Business School Press, 2000
Common
Knowledge has been heralded as one of the most practical books on knowledge
management. The Globe and Mail proclaimed it business book of the year.
Common Knowledge made a breakthrough in the understanding of knowledge
transfer by showing how the transfer process that an organization chooses must
match the type of knowledge that is being shared. What works for explicit
knowledge will not work for tacit. Nearly every chapter of this very readable,
yet scholarly, book starts with a story that clearly illustrates how an
organization was able to transfer a very specific type of knowledge.
Reviews
» Training & Development, April
2000,
by Jennifer J. Salopek, Nancy M.
Dixon
» Globe and
Mail (Ottawa, Canada)
- Named best business book of
the year
The
Organizational Learning Cycle: How we can learn collectively
Second
edition. Gower 1999
The
Organizational Learning Cycle was the first book to provide the theory that
underpins organizational learning. Its sophisticated approach enabled readers to
not only understand how, but more importantly why, organizations are able to
learn.
This new edition
takes the original concepts and theories and shows how they might, and are,
being put into action. With five new or completely revised chapters, Nancy Dixon
describes the kind of infrastructure organizations need to put in place; there
are examples of knowledge databases, whole systems in the room processes and
after-action reviews originating from organizations that are making real
progress with these ideas. A clearer relationship between organizational
learning and more participative forms of organizational governance is drawn,
along with responsibilities that employees need to take on to enable, and
partake in, collective learning. The Organizational Learning Cycle was
described by David Kolb as the best book on organizational learning he had
read.
Review
» Bill
Godfrey (Mt. Stuart, TAS Australia)
Perspectives on Dialogue: Making talk developmental
for individuals and organizations
The Center for Creative Leadership,
1996
There is
a growing sense today that organizations and the people who make them up are, to
repeat a figure of speech recently used by Robert Kegan, in over their heads. As
diversity becomes the rule and change the sole constant, complexity is
increasing. It is generally agreed that the only effective response to this
complexity is development: both at the individual and organizational level. One
frequently practiced but imperfectly understood developmental activity is talk.
This
paper looks at the relationship between talk and development in organizations,
noting the ways that developmental talk--or, as it is often referred to,
dialogue--differs from the skilled talk that goes on all the time. It also
summarizes five views on dialogue as offered by leading theorists, offers a
series of practical observations based on these views, and presents some
examples of how dialogue has been incorporated into the work processes of
organizations.
Dialogue at
Work
Lemos and Crane, 1998
There is a
growing sense today that organizations and the people who make them up are, to
repeat a figure of speech recently used by Robert Kegan, in over their heads. As
diversity becomes the rule and change the sole constant, complexity is
increasing. It is generally agreed that the only effective response to this
complexity is development: both at the individual and organizational level. One
frequently practiced but imperfectly understood developmental activity is talk.
This paper looks at the relationship between talk and development in
organizations, noting the ways that developmental talk--or, as it is often
referred to, dialogue--differs from the skilled talk that goes on all the time.
It also summarizes five views on dialogue as offered by leading theorists,
offers a series of practical observations based on these views, and presents
some examples of how dialogue has been incorporated into the work processes of
organizations.
