Customer Reviews

Learning to Fly, with Free CD-ROM: Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organizations

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What enables a company to soar in the midst of mergers, reorganisations and technology change? In their book, Learning to Fly, BP Consultants, Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell, share their secret for delivering more with less and positioning the company for future success. What's more important than the company's size, holdings or product lines? It is the use of Knowledge Management (KM) to adapt what others have already learned and dynamically capture and share the explicit and tacit knowledge of your work force as it evolves.

Learning to Fly is both a reference book and a blueprint. Part One: Overview sets the context for and defines knowledge management.

Part Two: Tools and Techniques describes six very useful tools for managing knowledge. I found their inclusion of real-life examples like BP's "Connect" project tremendously helpful in understanding what is involved in building buy-in for a searchable intranet knowledge directory through which all staff can search for people with relevant knowledge and experience.

In Part Three: Today and Tomorrow, the authors share practical advice about embedding knowledge management in the organisation. Appendices guide the reader to resources for inspiration, people and technology. Internet style pages enable easy navigation through and between chapters.

The book has received critical acclaim from a number of industry leaders. It will undoubtedly be received by those of us in the trenches with the same enthusiasm!

Collison & Parcell have put together a very down to earth approach to knowledge management. I liked their simple wisdom:

1) talk to people with the T-shirt: been there, done that

2) learn, learn, learn: before, during and after

3) cultivate a community: for tacit transfer and to keep the repository alive and fresh

4) establish a network: to gather news and keep yourself aware

Way too may KM projects chase content, without community, technology without a strategy and compile best practices with no way to validate and refresh. Chris and Geoff have the right spirit and advice when it comes to starting - jump right in and avoid the gradual immersion, ask some key questions, "What are your critical issues?" listen deeply and go with the flow!. Readers will find their people centric views and emphasis on learning, a refreshing and effective way to make sense of knowledge.work.

In particular, I found their book easy to navigate, clearly organized and easy to absorb in small chunks - there is a deep lesson there for any aspiring knowledge manager. They certainly hit the high spots in my book: yellowpages so you can find people that know, communities of practice for continuous learning, practices for testing and validating captured content to avoid GIGO (garbage in garbage out) and strategies to embed knowledge in role structures, processes and company lore.

A key aspect of learning to fly is the use personal and 3rd party stories to convey meaning and change mindsets. This helps to center the prescriptive aspects and changes the tone from a fieldbook to a readable engaging text. Learning to fly is a handy way to get your KM projects up and away, showing clearly the sky is the limit when we really start to work with our knowledge.

As a Knowledge Manager for a large organisation I come across a lot of books in the field. This has been one of the most helpful and practical KM books that I have seen for some time. We have been able to immediately utilise the advice from the authors to suit our situation.

We are just starting out with an implementation of a "corporate yellow pages". We have used references from the book to get signoff for the approach that we wanted to take (ie. a more casual approach rather than a HR-like listing), stolen ideas re the implementation!! and got fantastic support from the authors online. They do reply to your email! We are now well on track with the project, have high levels of buy-in across the organisation from Managing Director down and are keeping it simeple and therefore inside time and budget.

The book is well written with a good scattering of English humour to keep you interested! Highly recommended.

This must be one of the best books on KM I've seen for a long time. What I love about it - is its lack of focus on technology. Yes - BP are using technology in a big way - but it is just the enabler. The book focuses on the people side - building learning into an organization and on the concepts of the After-Action Review (AAR) - 'Learn Before', 'Learn During' and 'Learn After'.

Beyond the theory - here's 'the' hands-on guide to making KM work for real. As a practitioner of KM, I recognise and appreciate many of the initiatives and projects the authors successfully introduced and gained adoption of throughout BP. It's also refreshing to read that they had learning points to review too. This book illustrates how to achieve the ultimate goal - making KM part of the way to do business. KM is, after all, just good management, it shouldn't be regarded as an add-on, something extra to do. I recommend this book unreservedly to all who are engaged in KM activity - from those new to the field to those who (like me) want to make sure that they're doing the right things!

If you are wanting to implement knowledge management, look for practical advice here. I always recommend this book in project knowledge environments. These authors have a wealth of experience and are very approachable too.

Learning to Fly is fairly useful as a general overview of knowledge management principles, but it is far from great.

First, it doesn't quite live up to the promise made in the blurb: 'Learning to Fly shows exactly how to put theory into practice'. For one thing, there's very little theory in the book, which is not necessarily a bad thing -- just don't expect to gain a deeper understanding of the discipline by reading this book. But even the practical guidelines are a bit shallow and don't always give the reader a very clear idea of how things can be implemented.

Take, for instance, the crucial point of how to get started, presented in chapter 12 ('Embedding it in the organization', the second-to-last chapter). Here's all the authors have to say about the 'starting' stage (pp. 170-171):

"Starting with something simple. Applying one of the tools and techniques in this book to address a simple part of the issue is a good start. Demonstrating a 'quick win' is important to gain the interest and commitment of the team. If they see that these techniques can be applied, without spending too much time on them, to deliver some tangible results, then they are likely to come back for more. We have found it best to introduce some formality after this stage into the planning. What specifically will be done, what are the costs and the benefits and will the team commit some resources to it?"

That's it. They don't suggest, or give an example of, what might constitute a 'simple part of an issue' that could be used for a quick, low-cost demonstration. Since all the useful tools and techniques mentioned in the book have to do with changing the way a whole team, if not the whole organization, works, I would very much like to be given an example of how a 'quick win' can be accomplished. Surely not by suggesting a peer assist that will mobilize a bunch of people for a whole day -- management will never agree to that if they can't see the value of KM to start with.

Second, the book is written in an informal style that is probably supposed to give it a down-to-earth, let's-get-our-hands-dirty feel. But it's actually just not very well written and even more poorly edited (as evidenced by numerous ungrammatical bits like 'at the time when it most useful' and 'who are the people are involved') which, together with the shoddy typography, reveal overall carelessness and subpar organization.

Last, there's a lot of white space surrounding each paragraph, so the 220 pages could probably easily fit into 120 or so well laid-out pages.

The bottom line: U$25 is a steep price to pay for just okay contents packaged in a poorly designed paperback.

You've read the Knowledge Management theory: now read about the practical reality of it all. This book gives a unique account of how BP has applied the theories of KM in a large, multinational organisation and where it has been successful - the story of how it built on its successes and learned where things did not turn out as predicted.

Even if you are not connected with a company the size of BP, this book provides many practical "knowledge management nuggets" as well as some tested insights into KM theory that you can pick up and apply in your own environment, knowing that they have already been applied (and they worked) elsewhere.

What enables a company to soar in the midst of mergers, reorganisations and technology change? In their book, Learning to Fly, BP Consultants, Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell, share their secret for delivering more with less and positioning the company for future success. What's more important than the company's size, holdings or product lines? It is the use of Knowledge Management (KM) to adapt what others have already learned and dynamically capture and share the explicit and tacit knowledge of your work force as it evolves.

Learning to Fly is both a reference book and a blueprint. Part One: Overview sets the context for and defines knowledge management.

Part Two: Tools and Techniques describes six very useful tools for managing knowledge. I found their inclusion of real-life examples like BP's "Connect" project tremendously helpful in understanding what is involved in building buy-in for a searchable intranet knowledge directory through which all staff can search for people with relevant knowledge and experience.

In Part Three: Today and Tomorrow, the authors share practical advice about embedding knowledge management in the organisation. Appendices guide the reader to resources for inspiration, people and technology. Internet style pages enable easy navigation through and between chapters.

The book has received critical acclaim from a number of industry leaders. It will undoubtedly be received by those of us in the trenches with the same enthusiasm!

Very down-to-earth, applicable guidelines for building a learning environment within an organization. Focuses on tools and techniques and difficult issues of embedding habits of sharing/learning.
I've read a lot of knowledge management books and this is the one our organization is using as a "starting point" for our efforts.