Because the perceived benefits from cooperation normally outstrip those from going it alone—for instance ,by reducing transaction costs, collaboration mechanisms are integral to necessary management of (scarce) natural,human, tangible, and intangible resources—we delegate (and pay for), say, procurement of foodstuff, health care, education, entertainment, and protection to supermarkets, doctors, schools, the film industry, and armed forces. We do so by framing obligations for exchange of valuable things in marketplaces. Most exchanges are straightforward, self-executing matters giving satisfaction, e.g., the sale and purchase of a soft drink—if this were not so, controversy and dispute would soon suffocate society at large and the commerce that nurtures it; however, others are not.

Design is more important when function is taken for granted and no longer helps stakeholders differentiate. In the last five years, design thinking has emerged as the quickest organizational path to innovation and high-performance, changing the way creativity and commerce interact. In the past, design was a downstream step in the product development process, aiming to enhance the appeal of an existing product. Today, however, organizations ask designers to imagine solutions that meet explicit or latent needs and to build upstream entire systems that optimize customer experience and satisfaction.

Therefore, although the term "design" is commonly understood to describe an object (or end result), it is in its latest and most effective form a process, an action, and a verb, not a noun: essentially, it is a protocol to see, shape, and build. Lately, design approaches are also being applied to infuse insight into the heart of campaigns and address social and other concerns.

At the simplest level, dissemination is best described as the delivering and receiving of a message, the engagement of an individual in a process, or the transfer of a process or product. It is also helpful to think about dissemination in three broadly different ways,viz., dissemination for awareness, for understanding, and for action. Indeed, effective dissemination of a knowledge product will most likely require that it satisfy all three in turn: utilization is the goal.

Often, strategic reversals in organizational change are failures of execution. Poor communications explain much. That is because the real power of the vision that underpins change can only be unleashed if institutional commitment is verbalized to frame a desirable future; share core beliefs, common values, and understandings; and help motivate and coordinate the actions that drive transformation.

To spark action, credible, focused, jargon-free, on time, liberal, face-to-face, and two-way communication in the right context is necessary. Effective visions cannot be imposed on people: they must be set in motion by way of persuasion. Progressively then, communication for change (i) raises awareness and informs stakeholders of vision, progress, and outcomes; (ii) edifies stakeholders regarding their active involvement in the change process and imparts skills, knowledge, and appreciation; and (iii) generates buy in and a sense of excitement about the transformation. Personnel who communicate well incorporate each day, at every conceivable opportunity, messages that update, educate,and commit. They preach a vision through conversation and storytelling. They continually reaffirm it. The best visions call on the past, relate to the present, and link to the future.

Intelligence is a potential, and thinking is the operating skill through which it acts upon experience. Outside highly technical matters, perception is the most important part of thinking. If most errors of thinking are errors of perception—that being colored by emotions and values—thinking as a skill can be improved by practice and education. Numerous straightforward yet powerful tools encourage creativity and flexibility,and help optimize different styles of reasoning (including analyzing, integrating, planning, and problem solving). They include APC, OPV, PMI, brainstorming, lateral thinking,and mind maps. After they are mastered, these tools can be applied explicitly.

We usually write notes as sentences that we break into paragraphs, lists, or bullet points. A mind map is a circular, nonlinear way of organizing information: it shows the connections between a central topic and the relative importance of the concepts, themes, or tasks thatone relates to it. It can be applied by individuals and groups to generate, visualize, structure,and classify these whenever clearer thinking and improved learning will enhance performance and effectiveness.

E-learning, taken to mean all forms of electronically supported learning and teaching, entered formal higher education in the mid- to late 1990s, riding on the wave of interest in the knowledge economy (and thereafter the learning organization). (This is not to say that the experience has been an unqualified success: early attempts in universities, up to the mid-2000s, miscarried because e-learning ventures somehow failed to appreciate that education is not just a business, students are not mere consumers, and obtaining a degree is not quite the same as shopping online.) Currently, because the delivery of content through electronic information and communications technologies expands the realm of how, where, and when learners can engage, e-learning is also being mooted as a cheap and effective (just-in-time) way to provide private and public sector organizations the every-day learning opportunities they need to improve organizational outcomes.

Organizations have a vested interest in attracting, engaging, and retaining talent; but they also need to help personnel perform at the top of their game after they are hired. What is more, because the shelf life of informationis shorter and forces each one to constantly take on new roles, the rules of the game change daily. When it comesto learning, what is good for personnel is good for their organization. Training programs that are well managed can have a measurable effect. (That might be gauged at several levels, namely, reaction and satisfaction, learning results, on-the-job application, business impact, intangible benefits, and return on investment.) Since the need and associated rhetoric of flexible learning has been strongest in adult and continuous education, and explains in large part the attention given to communities and networks of practice,in recent years e-learning at the workplace augurs well.

Developing a culture of intelligent experimentation and failure analysis is no longer an option. Individuals, groups, and organizations must create, innovate, and reflect to generate the radical solutions they need to tackle challenges in markets, industries, organizations, geographies, intellectual disciplines, and generations. To accomplish this, they must learn to learn and learn to unlearn before, during, and after.

Organizations are communities, the members of which want worthwhile jobs that inspire them. Naturally, a committed and willing workforce brings substantial benefits. Some time ago, we recognized that formal relationships cannot by themselves be expected to conduce these entirely: implicit employer–employee exchanges matter. Belatedly, we concede that perceptions of an organization’s rules, ethos, and capabilities, not just the experience staff have of human resource practices, drive levels of effort and associated degrees of job satisfaction. More and more, organizations say they are looking for win–win solutions that match their needs with those of personnel: they examine the question of motivation with a fresh sense of purpose and conviction. Better still, high-performance organizations marshal and direct substantial resources to build effective behaviors and relationships, often in concert with human resource divisions. Engaging staff has come of age: in the 21st century, the concept affirms the importance of flexibility, change, and unremitting improvement in the workplace.

Concern for sound management of stocks and,increasingly, flows of knowledge is not a fad. To accomplish their missions, organizations must continually refresh their stocks of knowledge by being part of relevant flows of new knowledge. To this intent, communities (and networks) of practice have, since the mid-1990s, become an accepted part of organizational development. (In a mobile workforce,people are more likely to be aligned to their professional identity than to their organizational affiliation.) They are groups of like-minded, interacting people who filter, amplify, invest and provide, convene, build, and learn and facilitate to ensure more effective creation and sharing of knowledge in their domain. It is also recognized that a coordinating medium,or knowledge manager, is a key factor for managing knowledge in organizations, be that with reference to well-structured, ill-structured, or wicked problem solving. With decreasing bureaucracy and decentralization of operations, it makes sense to distribute leadership for organizational problem solving: the span of knowledge coordination should be as close as possible to relevant knowledge domains.

In the development sector, research in science, technologies, and ideas can make a difference if they identify what tools, methods, and approaches no longer work; test new ways of doing things; and link knowledgeof that in ways that inform policy and practice. Research, the systematic effort to increase the stock of knowledge, has innumerable applications. For this reason, educational institutions, governments, and philanthropic organizations—the three major purveyors of money—spend billions of dollars on research every year. A propos developing countries, where utilitarian science policy is favored, proponents contend persuasively that it can help save lives, reduce poverty, and improve the quality of human existence.

Ancient schools of thought about great men and more recent (sometimes overlapping)explanations form an ever-growing literature on leadership. In modern times, three broad categories have encompassed related theories: approaches have explored the traits(1940s–1950s) then behaviors or styles (1950s–1960s) of successful leaders; examined the contextual nature of leadership and the role of followers (1960s–1970s); and investigated what interactions of traits, behaviors, and situations (as well as group facilitation) might allow people to transact or transform for excellence (1980s). At the risk of simplifying, notwithstanding a few notable exceptions, these perspectives have been hierarchical, linear, male, Newtonian,pragmatic, and, above all, concerned with the leader as an individual.

John Kotter remains one of the most respected experts on the subject of change management. He began writing about change management back in the mid-1990s, when he first declared that only one change initiative in three actually achieved its stated objectives.

After more than a decade of research by academics and practitioners, one would think that we are now doing a much better job of managing change. Actually, that does not seem to be the case. In 2008, McKinsey & Company conducted a global survey of change management and found just aboutthe same results as Kotter had 12 years before—only a third of change management attempts are successful. What are we doing wrong?

• Time

• Cost

• Human Resources

• Scope

• Quality

• Actions

By gauging performance against these parameters, an image of the parts of a project that are in order and of those thatare not can be formed. Is the activity on schedule? Is the activity within budget? How many human resources are being expended? Is the activity’s scope in line with original expectations? Is project personnel analyzing and fixing problems with quality actions? Are actions outstanding? If all lights are green, performance will be highly satisfactory in all areas. If one or more are orange, the activity will have one or more potential problems. A red light will signal a parameter that requires urgent attention.

Change, that is, the act, process, or result of changing, is the norm. Change alone is unchanging: it works through the co-evolving dimensions of economy, environment, polity, society, and technology to make up systems of mutual sustainability or (inopposition) mutual vulnerability. (Since all dimensions are connected, none can change by itself.) On account of that, individually or in groups, we all experience change in our daily professional, personal, social, and civic occupations: change is the law of life. (If anything, the rate of change looks as if it is accelerating. But who are we to speak? Neolithic man probably thought the same.)

Despite worldwide attention to strategic planning, the notion of strategic practice is surprisingly new. This owes to widespread perception that strategic reversals owe to strategic miscalculations—the strategy was not sufficiently perceptive, imaginative, or visionary. Alternatively, it was too much of a good thing. But the truth is that strategic reversals are quite commonly failures of execution. In many cases, a strategy is abandoned out of impatience or because of pressure for an instant payoff before it has had a chance to take root and yield results. Or, its focal point is allowed to drift over time.

To draw a strategy is relatively easy but to execute it is difficult. Strategy is both a macro and a micro phenomenon that depends on synchronization. For that reason,it is worthwhile to examine a few elements of a disciplined process for systematically reviewing, evaluating, prioritizing, sequencing, managing, redirecting, and, if necessary,even canceling strategic initiatives.

Knowledge activities that have been identified as most widely used by an organization, often also called the knowledgelife cycle or the knowledge value chain. They are to identify, create, store, share, and use knowledge, often in a two-way exchange. Two important requirements have to be fulfilled to achieve improvements from these activities: (i) the activities should be aligned or integrated into business processes; and (ii) the activities should be balanced in accordance with the specificities of each process and organization. A knowledge management solution should not focus only on one or two activities in isolation.

The right stuff are inspiring, caring, infusing, and initiating managers who go about their business quietly, on the word of Henry Mintzberg. Warren Bennis, always keen on leaders, sees them as white knights who can somehow herd cats. Most people would be happy with either variety. Indeed, they would be happy with any of the prototypical characters drawn in management textbooks. But the fact is that such high-caliber material is not available for nearly all organizations. So it is important to make the most of what organizations do have and to spend, therefore, more time, integrity, and brainpower on making people decisions than on anything else.There are good reasons for this: experience shows that one in three promotions ends in failure, that one in three is just about effective, and that one in three comes to pass right.The quality of promotion and staffing decisions reveals the values and standards of management and whether it takes its duties seriously.

Creativity has always been at the heart of human endeavor. Allied to innovation, which creates unexpected value, it is now recognized as central to organizational performance.(Some hold that the capacity to harness intellectual and social capital—and to convert that into novel and appropriate things—has become the critical organizational requirementof the age.) The shift to knowledge economies has been abrupt and there is a flurry of interest in creativity and innovation in the workplace. Innovation is considered, quite simply, an imperative for organizational survival. It may even be the key to some of the biggest challenges facing the world, such as global warming andsustainable development. Notwithstanding, we are still far from a theory of organizational creativity: the avenues for promising research that might contribute to its emergence are innumerable because of the increasing use of systems approaches and the growing number of agents involved in knowledge flows.

The so-called know-do gap is one outcome of poor knowledge translation and organizational forgetting. In decreasing order of incidence, that is commonly attributed to (i) shortage of resources, e.g., skills, time, and finance, (ii) lack of buy in at all levels within and across organizations, and (iii)information overload. Shortage of resources affects policymakers, researchers, and practitioners equally.

In the 21st century, intra-organizational flows of knowledge have become as important as the resource itself. And so, managing both stocks and flows has become an imperative rather than an alternative for most organizations. Knowledge harvesting is a means to draw out, express, and package tacit knowledge to help others adapt, personalize, and apply it; build organizational capacity; and preserve institutional memory. In addition to context and complexity, the concepts that relate to it are tacit knowledge stocks, tacit knowledge flows, and enablers and inhibitors of tacit knowledge work.

A good practice is defined as anything that has been tried and shown to work in some way—whether fully or in part but with at least some evidence of effectiveness—and that may have implications for practice at any level elsewhere. Three possible levels of good practice flow from this: promising practices, demonstrated practices, and replicated practices. Since knowledge is both explicit and tacit, good practice programs should comprise two elements: good practices databases that connect people with information, and collaboration or knowledge sharing and learning mechanisms, such as communities of practice or peer assists that connect people with people.

Formal authority—the power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior—is the defining characteristic of societal and organizational hierarchy. Ideally, after Ronald Heifetz, it is expected to serve five functions that most will agree are indispensable to social life. They are to (i) provide direction, (ii) offer protection, (iii) orientate roles, (iv) control conflict, and (v) maintain norms. Then again, in practice, there is a darker side to what formal authority can do on any given day: for instance, a boss can restrict a subordinate’s actions, invalidate his or her decisions, or move for dismissal.

Leadership is a complex and contested subject. But thereis no doubt that the consequences of modernity throw up unprecedented challenges that beg better understanding of its nature in organizations.

It is time to rediscover the power of work and forge better ways to lead or compete—but in both instances succeed—with those who, typically with creativity and innovation or, some prefer, imagination and invention, do the intellectual work that matters most. Excellence is impossible without top talent, aka chief possibility officers.

Because the range of types (not to mention levels) of learningis broad, organizations have, from the early days, followed a division-of-labor approach to ascribing responsibility for learning. Typically, responsibility is vested in a policy (or research) unit to allow managers to focus on decision makingwhile other organizational constituents generate information and execute plans. Without doubt, this has encouraged compartmentalization of whatever learning is generated.What is more, since organizational constituents operate in different cultures to meet different priorities, each questions the value added by the arrangement.

In the corporate world, the precedence ascribed to individual learning can run counter to organizational learning, the process by which an organization and its people develop their capabilities to create a desired future. Without doubt, developing capabilities is a precondition of a desired future; however, if the essence of a learning organization is that it actively identifies, creates, stores, shares, and uses knowledge to anticipate, adapt to, and maybe even shape a changing environment, the driving concern must be reflection, communication, and collective sense makingfor action across its personnel. (Proponents of organizational learning grumble that people in organizations perform collectively yet still learn individually from incomplete, heterogeneous information to which they ascribe different meaning.) Intra-organizational interaction for learning cannot depend on serendipity: it must be encouraged, facilitated, recognized, and rewarded. Increasingly, narration is deemed a good vessel for bridging knowledge and action in the workplace.

The resource-based view of the firm that gained currency in the mid-1980s considered that the competitive advantage of an organization rests on the application of the strategic resources at its disposal. These days, orthodoxy recognizes the merits of the dynamic, knowledge-based capabilities underpinning the positions organizations occupy in a sector or market.

Strategic alliances—meaning cooperative agreements between two or more organizations—are a means to enhance strategic resources: self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly difficult in a complex, uncertain, and discontinuous external environment that calls for focus and flexibility in equal measure. Everywhere, organizations are discovering that they cannot “go” it alone and must now often turn to others to survive.

Most development agencies have committed to become learning organizations. But the use of evaluation for learning may be less important than that of other inputs, such as self evaluation and training, and evaluation results may only marginally support policy, strategy, and operational changes. In 2006, the Independent Evaluation Department in the Asian Development Bank determined to apply knowledge management to lesson learning. In 2007, it formulated a strategic framework to improve the organizational culture, management system, business processes, information technology solutions, community of practice, and external relations and networking forthat. These Knowledge Solutions explain the strategic framework. They also describe the knowledge audit methodology developed to tie in with the department’s audiences. The online, questionnaire-based survey of perceptions conducted as a first exercise that year provided ready and multiple entry points against which the department can take measures to that intent, as well as a comprehensive baseline assessment against which to judge progress. Fundamentally, these Knowledge Solutions contend that evaluation agencies should move from “make-and-sell,” at the simplest level, to “sense-and-respond” in ways that are increasingly satisfying to stakeholders. Knowledge from evaluations will notbe used effectively if the specific organizational context, knowledge, and relationships of evaluation agencies, and the external environment they face, are not dealt with in an integrated and coherent manner. Knowledge management can shed light on possible operating frameworks for this and knowledge management initiatives can be applied to catalyze and facilitate identification, creation, storage, sharing, and use of lessons. That would be knowledge utilization indeed.

The hallmarks of the modern organization are satellite offices, remote offices, home offices, virtual offices, hotelling facilities, and the electronic mail that underpins—and promotes—these. Today, knowledge workers receive few telephone calls and electronic mail is their communication vehicle of choice. (The use of videoconferencing is growing,too.) After all, why should they walk around if they can type, point, and click? At the receiving end, managers are known to collect more than 150 messages each day. Yet, as knowledge workers on the rise tote up electronic status, they also distance themselves from colleagues.

Managing by walking around was popularized by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in the early 1980s because it was (already then) felt that managers were becoming isolated from their subordinates. At Hewlett-Packard, where the approach was practiced from 1973, executives were encouraged to know their people, understand their work, and make themselves more visible and accessible. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's business philosophy, centered on deep respect for people and acknowledgment of their built-in desire to do a good job, had evolved into informal, decentralized management and relaxed, collegial communication styles. Theirs was the opposite of drive-by management.

Reputation is not about likability: it is the aggregate estimation in which a person or entity is held by individuals and the public against a criterion, based on past actions and perceptual representation of future prospects, when compared to other persons or entities. Since we cannot develop a personal relationship with every entity in the world, the regard in which a party is held is a proxy indicator of predictability and the likelihood the party will meet expectations, a useful earmark that facilitates sense and decision making against alternatives.

Every day, through what amounts to a distributed means of social control, we assess and judge with effect the competence of individuals and organizations to fulfill expectations based on such social evaluation.

Assumptions about people working in organizations are less and less tenable. One misleading notion is that they are subordinate employees retained around the clock; another is that they rely on their organization for livelihood and career. One hundred years ago, in the United States and Europe, the largest single group of workers labored in agriculture. Sixty years later, it consisted of technical, professional, and managerial people. Today, it is made up of knowledge workers who may practice at an organization but might not be its employees. And, if they are in full-time employment, fewer and fewer are subordinates.

What of it? Observers make out that working habits are shifting from lifetime employment in a single organization to portfolio work. Knowledge workers produce and distribute ideas and information rather than goods or services. They are individuals with different aspirations from the hierarchy-conscious personnel of the past; they are also mobile and they do leave. Hiring talented people is difficult. Keeping them is more difficult still. So, to plug the drain of human capital in a competitive knowledge economy, knowledge workers should be treated as an asset rather than as a cost. Preferably, theyshould be managed as though they were partners (or at least volunteers).

A team is a cooperative unit of interacting individuals whoare committed to a common purpose on tasks; endowed with complementary skills, for instance, in technical competence,problem-solving ability, and emotional intelligence; and who share interdependent performance goals (with indicators anddeadlines) as well as an approach to work for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. (People try to accomplishwith others what they cannot do alone.) When theyare effective, teams are typified by intelligibility of purpose, trust, open communication, clear roles, the right mix of talent and skills, full participation, individual performance, quality control, risk taking, collective delivery of products and services, an appropriate level of sponsorship and resources,and balanced work-life interactions. Their stages of development are likely universal.

But here commonalities end: thanks to globalization and, chiefly, the advent of the Internet, unusual teams whose members may never meet face to face have come to proliferate. Their distinct configurations raise unique challenges for managers, to which literature and practice are only just beginning to pay attention.

Marketing in the public sector maybe the final frontier. Agencies operating in the public domain can use a custom blend of the four Ps—product (orservice), place, price,and promotion—as well as othermarketing techniques to transform their communications with stakeholders, improve their performance,and demonstrate a positive return on the resources they are endowed with.

Feedback is a circular causal process whereby some portion of a system’s output is returned to the input to control the dynamic behavior of the system. In organizations, feedback is the process of sharing observations, concerns, and suggestions to improve performance. In work that seeks to address theincreasingly complex challenges of development, often with limited resources, feedback is essential to maximize development impact. Examples of feedback include audits, performance appraisals, monitoring and evaluation,shareholders' meetings, surveys, and 360-degree assessments.

Courage is the ability to confront danger, fear, intimidation, pain, or uncertainty. Physical courage is fortitude in the face of death (and its threat), hardship, or physical pain. Moral courage, the form the attribute nowadays refers to, is put simply the ability to act rightly in the face of discouragement or opposition,possibly and knowingly running the risk of adverse personal consequences. Springing from ethics—notably integrity, responsibility, compassion, and forgiveness—it is thequality of mind or spirit that enables a person to withstand danger, difficulty, or fear; persevere; and venture. Comprehensively—as said by Christopher Rate et al., it is awillful, intentional act, executed after mindful deliberation, involving objective substantial risk to the bearer, and primarily motivated to bring about a noble good or worthy enddespite, perhaps, the presence of the emotion of fear.

The core concept in marketing has always been that of transaction, whereby an exchange of values takes place .However, in parallel with changes in cultures, lifestyles, andtechnologies, the emphasis in marketing has shifted from individual transactions: the new focus is on establishing long-term relationships.

Marketing and branding are inextricably linked. To meet demand and facilitate transaction, the objectives that a good brand achieves are to deliver the message clearly, confirm credibility, connect emotionally to the targeted prospects,motivate the end users, and concretize user loyalty.

Having a strong brand is invaluable as competition intensifies. Brand management—that is, the art of creating and maintaining a brand—now requires that the whole organization support its brand with integrated marketing. The stronger the brand, the greater the loyalty of end users is. The stronger the brand, the more flexible an organization is. Higher staff morale leads to higher productivity and better results.

Data are facts, and information is interpreted data. Knowledge is created and organized by flows of information, shaped by their holder. It is tacit or explicit. Tacit knowledge is nonverbalized, intuitive, and unarticulated knowledge that people carry in their heads. It is hard to formalize and communicate because it is rooted in skills, experiences, insight, intuition,and judgment, but it can be shared in discussion, storytelling,and personal interactions. It has a technical dimension, which encompasses skills and capabilities referred to as know-how. It has a cognitive dimension, which consists of beliefs, ideals,values, schemata, or mental models. Explicit knowledge is codified knowledge that can be expressed in writing, drawings, or computer programs, for example, and transmittedin various forms. Tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge are mutually complementary forms of meaning.

Reminiscing, be it simple, informative, or of the life review, therapeutic variety—different but overlapping types exist—isa uniquely human activity that plays a vital role. By recalling the past, celebrating accomplishments and—as necessary—coming to terms with disappointments, individuals can achieve a heightened sense of personal identity and self continuity,notably in their social relationships. At the confluence of voluntary memory and events, circumstances, and experience, they can find meaning and coherence in life and work.

Development agencies must show that their activities make significant and lasting contributions to the welfare of intended beneficiaries. But they may well be trying to measure results that are beyond their reach: the impacts they cite asevidence are often the result of a confluence of events for which they cannot realistically get full credit.

Outcome mapping exposes myths about measuring impacts and helps to answer such questions. A project or program that uses the framework and vocabulary of outcome mapping does not claim the achievement of development impacts, nor does it belittle the importanceof changes in state. Rather, it focuses on its contributions to outcomes (that may in turn enhance the possibility of development impacts—the relationship is not inevitably a direct one of cause and effect.) More positively, because outcome mapping limits its concerns to those results that fall strictly within a project or program’s sphere of influence,development agencies can become more specific about the actors they target, the changesthey expect to see, and the strategies they employ.

Logic models (results frameworks) neither guarantee a good project (or program) design nor replace other instruments ofproject management. But they help to analyze problems; identify desired outcomes; establish a logical hierarchy of means by which the desired outcomes will be reached; identify clustersof outputs; determine how accomplishments might be monitored and evaluated, and planned and actual results compared; flag the assumptions on which a project is based and the associated risks; summarize a project in a standard format; build consensus with stakeholders; and create ownership of the project.

Organizational learning is collective learning by individuals,and the fundamental phenomena of individual learning apply to organizations. However, organizational learning has distinctive characteristics concerning what is learned, how it is learned, and the adjustments needed to enhance learning.These owe to the fact that an organization is, by general definition, a collective whose individual constituents work to achieve a common goal from discrete operating and supporting units. Practices bring different perspectives and cultures to bear and shape data, information, and knowledge flows. Political considerations are the most serious impediment to becoming a learning organization.However, by understanding more fully what obstacles to learning can exist in a complex organization ina complex environment, one can circumscribe the problem space and create enabling environments for a more positive future. Such environments would facilitate self-organization, exploration of the space of possibilities, generative feedback, emergence,and coevolution.They would create an explanatory framework and facilitate action.

How can investments in knowledge management be picked? This is no easy matter. What can be measured is not necessarily important and what is important cannot always be measured. Not surprisingly, despite the wide implementation of knowledge management initiatives, a systematic and comprehensive assessment tool to prioritize investments in knowledge management in terms of return on investment is not available. This owes to the difficulty of demonstrating direct linkages between investments in knowledge management and organizational performance, most of which canonly be inferred, and the fact that the miscellany of possible knowledge management initiatives calls for both quantitative and qualitative approaches. This is indeed the rationale behind the Balanced Scorecard introduced by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in 1992, whose qualities make it quite useful as a knowledge management metric.

Economics—the social science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of material wealth and with the theory and management of economic systems or economies—was once called political economy.Anchored in moral philosophy, thence the art and science of government, this articulated the belief in the 18th–19th centuries that political considerations—and the interest groups that drive them—have primacy in determining influence and thus economic outcomes at (almost) any level of investigation. However, with the division of economics and political science into distinct disciplines from the 1890s, neoclassical economists turned from analyses of power and authority to models that, inherently, remove much complexity from the issues they look into.

Knowledge and information often stay where they are generated. For that reason, the performance of research institutions hangs on the ability to disseminate research findings to different audiences. For each research agenda, this calls for a dissemination policy, a dissemination plan, a dissemination strategy, and dissemination tactics.

Over the past 10 years, the world has witnessed the amazingly rapid development of the internet as a worldwide communications network linking millions of computers. Not surprisingly, the internet is now the primary means of disseminating research findings, such as through digital libraries containing electronic journals, electronic print archives, and conference proceedings. It is now possible for all researchers to use the internet to promote research online so that it may be invoked by peers,educators, students, journalists, customers for research expertise, and the general public. Research institutions ignore the internet at their peril.

This report begins with a history of sourcing policy that focuses on the terms commercial and inherently governmental, and the policy of government reliance on the private sector. The following section examines the two strains of sourcing policy: competitive sourcing and multi-sector workforce management. The juxtaposition of the Bush Administration’s competitive sourcing initiative and the Obama Administration’s multi-sector workforce management effort aids in understanding different, yet potentially complementary, facets of sourcing policy. Policy issues that may be of interest to the 112th Congress are also discussed.

The narrative also has a larger agenda. Connections between public health quarantines and bio-cultural determinisms have long participated in the construction of public enemies. For instance in the 1980s, during the early years of the AIDS panic in the United States, public health officials could take for granted a citizenry that had long trusted in abstract empirical scientific knowledge and, for half a century, in the disease curing power of pharmacology's sulfa drugs and other antibiotics. Even so, in the first moments of panic all sorts of calls for screens and quarantine impacted on public policy discussions in ways reminiscent of the years between the 1890s and 1920s. During those years biological determinisms from the past had remained in the saddle. Even as modern public health programmes were becoming dramatically successful in fighting disease, they remained affected by hierarchies of bio-cultural notions, especially in apprehensions about immigrants as agents of dangerous contagious diseases.

That is one reason why this article focuses on Jews. The other reason derives from the evidence about Jews and disease in the places and times covered by this study. To be sure, there were other quarantines, involving, for example, resident Chinese and Italians; and in the months after the First World War potential incomers from Italy were at least as much an object of concern among American advocates of immigration restriction as were the Jews in Poland. But, in part, because of a typhus epidemic in that war-torn country, the association between disease and bio-cultural assumptions about Jews retained its traditional particularity in Western Europe and in the United States.

Complex systems cannot be reduced; however, wheresociety or an organization is multipart or too large for simplemanagement, it usually moves for the creation of entitiestasked with guiding related processes and systems in their host’s co-evolving context ofsociety, economy, environment, polity, and technology.

It follows that governance, the activity of governing, is a multifaceted phenomenon;definitions of it can be subtle, challenging, and powerful at once. With frequent overlapand resultant conflict, governance shapes affairs at global, national (including, forinstance, state or provincial, municipal, and local), institutional, and community levels bymeans of the entities that occupy shifting (and frequently permeable) social and economicspace there, such as government (including the military), civil society (including thevoluntary or not-for-profit sector), and the private sector. (Public and private media playadvocacy, entertainment, and advertising roles throughout.) All the same, most definitionsof governance rest on three dimensions: (i) authority, (ii) decision making, and (iii)accountability for conformance (assurance) and performance (value creation and resourceutilization). Hence, regimes of governance determine severally who has authority, whomakes decisions (and how other stakeholders make their voice heard), and the manner inwhich account is rendered.

To note, corporate values do not equate with organizational culture: that describes the attitudes, experiences, beliefs, and values of the organization, acquired through social learning, that control the way individuals andgroups in the organization interact with one another and with parties outside it. Corporate values are firstorderoperating philosophies or principles, to be acted upon, that guide an organization's internal conduct andits relationship with the external world. (To be clear, corporate values do not drive the business; however, if they are imbedded in business processes—and made credible to skeptics—they inspire the people who deliverthe business, with a healthy balance between work and life and betweenthe short term and the long term.) The ultimate glue that bonds the bestorganizations, they are usually formalized in explicit—often espoused,not just embedded—mission statements, tag lines, and branding material.Important elements are content and context.

• Human capital—the cumulative capabilities and engagement of an organization's personnel, rooted in tacitand explicit knowledge, that can be invested to serve the joint purpose.

• Relational (or customer) capital—the formal and informal external relationships, counting the information flows across and knowledge partnerships in them, that an organization devises with clients, audiences, and partners to co-create products and services, expressed in terms of width (coverage), channels (distribution),depth (penetration), and attachment (loyalty).

• Structural (or organizational) capital—the collective capabilities of an organization—any of themcodified, packaged, and systematized, including its governance, values, culture, managementphilosophy, business processes, practices, research and development, intellectual property,performance metrics, and information systems, as well as the systems for leveraging them.

Organizational culture may have been forged by thefounder; it may emerge over time as the organization faceschallenges and obstacles; or it may be created deliberately bymanagement.

Nondualistic and nonreductionistic, social neuroscience, through a multilevel and integrative approach,aims to understand the role of the central nervous system in the formation and maintenance of social behaviorsand processes. Spanning the social and biological domains, e.g., molecular, cellular, system, person, relational,collective, and societal, it exploits biological concepts and neurobiological techniques such as functionalmagnetic resonance imaging—which measures patterns of blood oxygenation responses in the brain as a subject engages in a particular task, to inform and refine theories of social behavior. In short, it focuses on howthe brain mediates social interaction.(Brain scans captured through functional magnetic resonance imagingshow that the same areas are associated with distress, be that caused by social rejection or by physical pain.)

Arguably, the potential benefits of social neuroscience are that it can inform debates in social psychology,provide tools for measuring brain–body activity directlyand unobtrusively and provide information that would beimpossible to assess using other techniques, and permit theexamination of social processes by pointing to the importanceof social variables (from context to culture) in alteringprocesses within the brain and body.

Talent management has become one of the most pressing topics in organizations (evenif very few have strategies and operational programs in place with which to identify, recruit,develop, deploy, and retain the best). The competition for talent will define organizationalmilieus for a couple of decades to come. Springing from the three trends, several drivers fuel the emphasis:• Workforce demographics are evolving.

• The context in which organizations conduct their operations is increasingly complex and dynamic.

• More efficient capital markets have enabled the rise of small and medium-sized organizations that offeropportunities few large organizations can match, exerting a pull across the talent spectrum.

• In knowledge economies, talent is a rapidly increasing source of value creation.

• A demonstrated correlation between talent and organizational performance exists: talented individualsdrive a disproportionate share of organizational effectiveness. (Value creation extends beyond individualperformance differentials.)

• Financial markets and boards of directors demand more.

• The mobility of personnel is quickening on a par with changing expectations. If talent is hard to find, it isbecoming harder to keep.

Action learning is an educational process by which a person studies his or her own actions and experience to improveperformance. Put simply, it is about solving problems and getting things done. In action learning, a smallgroup of 5–8 persons (called action learning set) meets regularly for a day or half a day over at least 6 months and works collectively on a problem faced in ongoing practice. The action learning set helps a “presenter”work on a problem through supportive but challenging questioning. It encourages a deeper understanding of theissues involved, a reflective reassessment of the problem, and an exploration of ways forward. (Action learningrequires that actions be agreed at the end of each meeting.) By so doing, it provides a structured way of workingthat provide the discipline we often need to learn from what we do and improve practice as a result.

Appreciative inquiry is a relatively new form of action research that originated in the United States in the mid-1980s and is now being used around the world. It studies the positive attributes of organizations to create new conversations among people as they work togetherfor organizational renewal. It involves in its broadest focus the systematic discovery ofwhat gives life to a human system when it is most alive, most effective, and most capable in environmental, economic, societal, political, and technological terms. It involves, in acentral way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacityto apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. It is based on two assumptions: first, organizations always move in the direction of the questions their members ask andthe things they talk about; second, energy for positive change is created when organizations engage continually in remembering and analyzing circumstances when they were at their best rather thanfocusing on problems and how they can be solved. The approach invites organizations to spend time creatinga common vision for their desired future and developing the images and language to bring that vision to life.

Derived from the context of socialinteraction, different classifications ofquestions have been proposed. The most common refers to the degree of freedom,or scope, given to the respondent. Those that leave the respondent free to selectany one of several ways in which toanswer are termed open questions; those that require a short response of a specific natureare labeled closed questions. Other types include recall and process questions, affectivequestions, leading questions, probing questions, rhetorical questions, and multiple questions.

Capacity development is the process whereby people, organizations, and society as awhole unleash, strengthen, create, adapt, and maintain capacity over time. In 2005, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness called for capacity development to be an explicitobjective of the national development and poverty reduction strategies of partner countries. Bilateral and multilateral agencies, among others, have responded by elevating capacitydevelopment in their operations, and given attention to factors that drive successand factors that deter from it.

• What are an organization’s knowledge needs?

• What tacit and explicit knowledge assets does it have and where are they?

• How does knowledge flow within the organization, formally and informally, and toand from clients and relevant organizations?

• How is that knowledge identified, created, stored, shared, and used?

• What obstacles are there to knowledge flows, e.g., to what extent do its people, businessprocesses, and technology currently support or hamper the effective movement ofknowledge?

• What gaps and duplications exist in the organization’s knowledge?

An organization is a social arrangement to pursue acollective intent. Coordination, and the requisite communication it implies, is fundamental to organizational performance toward that. Yet, many organizations grapple with thechallenge of connecting the subsystems they have devised to enhance specific contributing functions. Here and there, organizational, spatial, and social boundaries impede—whenthey do not block—the flows of knowledge needed to make full use of capabilities. High costs are borne from duplication of effort, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies. Everywhere, large organizations must move from managing silos to managing systems.

For organizations wishing to remain relevant and thrive, learning better and faster is critically important. Many organizations apply quick and easy fixes often driven bytechnology. Most are futile attempts to create organizational change. However, organizational learning is neither possible nor sustainable without understanding what drives it. The figure below shows the subsystems of a learning organization:organization, people, knowledge, and technology. Each subsystem supports the others in magnifying the learning as it permeates across the system.

• They are peer-to-peer collaborative networks.

• They are driven by the willing participation of their members.

• They are focused on learning and building capacity.

• They are engaged in sharing knowledge, developing expertise, and solving problems.

The rights and responsibilities of people are central to progress. And participation is essential since privileged minorities seldom approve of reforms and concentration of political, economic, or social power in their hands has retarded development. Therefore, five questions must be asked. Who initiates? Who participates? Who decides? Who controls? And who benefits? If it is the people, then development activities will most likely succeed (bearing in mind that the chance to take part hinges in turn on access toinformation, freedom of association to hold discussions, and arrangement of regular meetings at which officials and representatives can listen and respond to communities and be held accountable for delivering particular outputs.)

Knowledge cannot be separated from the networks that create, use, and transform it. In parallel, networks now play significant roles in how individuals, groups, organizations,and related systems operate. They will be even more important tomorrow. Since we can no longer assume that closely knit groups are the building blocks of human activity—or treat these as discrete units of analysis—we need to recognize and interface with less-bounded organizations, from non-local communities to links among websites. We should makecertain that knowledge harvested in the external environment is integrated with what existswithin, especially in dynamic fields where innovation stems from inter-organizationalknowledge sharing and learning. Therefore, the structure and composition of nodes and ties, and how these affect norms and determine usefulness, must become key concerns. This makes the study of networks of practice a prime interest for both researchers and practitioners.

Trust is therefore both an emotional and a rational (cognitive, calculative, and rational) act. The emotions associated with it include affection, gratitude, security, confidence, acceptance, interest, admiration, respect, liking, appreciation, contentment, and satisfaction,all of them necessary ingredients of psychological health. The logic of it is grounded inassessments of a party’s dependability, which play a significant role in decisions to trust. As expected, there are different intensities to trust, depending on why one grants trust and why it is accepted: knowing the different types of trust informs decision making at each level.

Strangely, however, despite instinctive recognition of the importance of trust in human affairs, its conceptualization in the workplace remains limited in literature—but grew in the 1990s, while actions to foster it in that environment are still not readily discernible in practice.

Exit interviews are a way to capture knowledge from leavers. Peer assists are about teams asking for help for the benefit of their members. They are about “learning before doing.” But continuously assessing organizational performance to meetor exceed expectations requires also that one obtain feedbackand understand what happened (or did not happen) during an activity or project, or soon after completion. After-actionreviews are about “learning while doing:” they identify how to correct shortcomings and sustain accomplishments. Retrospectsare about “learning after doing:” they capture the new knowledge acquired after the fact. In both instances, knowledge gleaned from andcompiled by those closest to the review can be used to improve results and can be shared with others who are planning, developing, implementing, and evaluating similar efforts.

In most organizations, staff are busy and they vote withtheir feet. If they are bored or not actively engaged, they will find excuses to leave. Some will never return to presentations conducted by the same speaker. The good news is that guidelines for conducting effective presentations are simple and do not depend on the speaking ability of the person sharing the message.

More recently, the practice of exit interviews has been revisited as a knowledge management tool to capture and store knowledge from departing employees and minimize loss through staff turnover. This is especially relevant in roles where the employee embodies significant human capital that may be passed to appropriate employees remainingin the organization. Most departing employees are pleased to share knowledge, help asuccessor, or brief management, in so doing yield information that may be used to enhance all aspects of an organization’s working environment including culture, management, business processes, and intra- as well as inter-organizational relationships. Not withstanding, participation in exit interviews and responses to exit interview questionnaires mus tbe voluntary.

The formal use of peer assists as a management tool was pioneered by British Petroleum to help staff learn from the experiencesof others before they embark on an activity or project. Put simply, a peer assist is the process whereby a team working on an activity or project calls a meeting or workshop to seek knowledge and insights from a good mix of people in other teams. From the onset, the distinction between a peer assist and a peer review should be made explicit: without it participants will fall into the familiar patterns of peer reviews and little knowledge will be transferred.

There are as many reasons for conducting a retreat as there are issues and challenges facing an organization. Among the most common uses of retreats are

• Helping set or change strategic direction.

• Fostering a collective vision.

• Creating a common framework and point of reference.

• Developing annual goals, objectives, and budgets.

• Discussing specific issues or challenges facing the organization.

• Dealing with sources of conflict and confusion.

• Generating creative solutions for entrenched problems.

• Improving working relationships and increasing trust.

• Encouraging honest and enlightened conversations.

• Letting people be heard on issues that are important to them.

• Orienting new staff.

For sure, pace the propensity of intellectuals to promulgate eternal truths, or at leastmake a lasting impression, the idea of critical thinking neither begins nor ends with Pascal or Descartes. Socrates set the agenda nearly 2,500 years ago when the “Socratic Method” established the need to seek evidence, analyze basic concepts, scrutinizereasoning and assumptions, and trace the implications not only of what is said but ofwhat is done as well: “Knowledge will not come from teaching but from questioning.”Thereafter, within the overall framework of skepticism, numerous scholars raisedawareness of the potential power of reasoning and of the need for that to be systematically cultivated and cross-examined.

Critical thinking, by its very nature, demands recognition that all questioning stems from a point of view and occurswithin a frame of reference; proceeds from some purpose—presumably, to answer a question or solve a problem; relieson concepts and ideas that rest in turn on assumptions; has an informational base that must be interpreted; and draws on basic inferences to make conclusions that have implications and consequences. To note, eachdimension of reasoning is linked simultaneously with the other; problems of thinking in any of them will impactothers and should be monitored. Hence, effective, full-spectrum questioning6 that connects from multiple perspectives must illuminate each element of thought so it may permeate the model.

Since people (not economies) are the main object and ultimate purpose of endeavors to progress, a society’s cultureis not just an instrument of development cooperation: it is its basis. The marriage of economy and environment was overdue and has spawned a world agenda for that purpose. Likewise, the relationship between culture and development should be clarified and deepened in ways that are authentic, indigenous, self-reliant, sovereign, civilized, and creative.

Culture theory is a branch of anthropology, semiotics, and other related social science disciplines such as political economy, in particular, but also sociology and communication(to name a few). It seeks to define heuristic concepts of culture. Hence, cultural studiesoften concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology, nationality,ethnicity, social class, and gender. The potential for application is correspondingly vast—it follows that practitioners of culture theory draw from a diverse array of theoriesand associated practices and encompass many different approaches, methods, and academic perspectives. And so, it remains relatively unstructured as an academic field thatneeds to move from “Let’s” to “How.” Taking culture into account should mean understanding how cultural dimensions enter utility and production functions of various kinds.In the case of development agencies and their partner countries, new processes of policyanalysis and participatory management should surely be devised so that non-economicsocial sciences become full partners in the decision-making concerning the policy andinvestment decisions that guide business processes. Much remains to be done.