"This is the final product of a six year effort to define, assess and measure tacit knowledge for leadership among U.S. Army officers. Tacit knowledge is defined as knowledge grounded in experience, intimately related to action, and not well supported by formal training and doctrine. Tacit knowledge for leadership was researched at three different levels of command and developed into assessment inventories for each level. The assessment inventories have been construct validated and proven to predict certain leadership effectiveness ratings at each level and to do so better than measures of verbal reasoning ability, tacit knowledge for business managers, or experience. The report describes the constructs of "practical intelligence" and "tacit knowledge", other research related to them, the general methods used in assessing tacit knowledge, and the development of the Tacit Knowledge for Military Leaders inventories. There is also a chapter on the practical implications for leadership development and training. An expanded version of this report will appear as a commercially available book entitled, Practical Intelligence in Everyday Life by the same authors. " -- Stinet.

Those responsible for professional development in public and private-sector organizations have long had to deal with an uncomfortable reality. Billions of dollars are spent on formal education and training directed toward the development of job incumbents, yet the recipients of this training spend all but a fraction of their working life outside the training room--in meetings, on the shop floor, on the road, or in their offices. Faced with the need to promote "continuous learning" in a cost-effective manner, trainers, consultants, and educators have sought to develop ways to enrich the instructional and developmental potential of job assignments--to understand and facilitate the "lessons of experience." Not surprisingly, social and behavioral scientists have weighed in on the subject of on-the-job learning, and one message of their research is quite clear. This message is that much of the knowledge people use to succeed on the job is acquired implicitly--without intention to learn or awareness of having learned. The common language of the workplace reflects an awareness of this fact as people speak of learning "by doing" or "by osmosis" and of professional "instinct" or "intuition." Psychologists, more careful if not clearer in their choice of words, refer to learning without intention or awareness as "implicit learning" and refer to the knowledge that results from this learning as "tacit knowledge." Tacit Knowledge in Professional Practice explores implicit learning and tacit knowledge as they manifest themselves in the practice of six knowledge-intensive professions, and considers the implications of a tacit-knowledge approach for increasing the instructional and developmental impact of work experiences. This volume brings together distinguished practitioners and researchers in each of the six disciplines to discuss their own research and/or professional experience and to engage each other's views. It addresses professional practice in its totality -- from the technical to the interpersonal to the crassly commercial -- not simply a few aspects of practice that lend themselves to controlled study. Finally, this edited volume seeks to go beyond the enumeration of critical experiences to an understanding of the psychological mechanisms that underlie learning from experience in professional disciplines and, in so doing, to lay a foundation for innovations in professional education and training.

"The Tacit Dimension" argues that tacit knowledge -tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments- is a crucial part of scientific knowledge. This volume challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.

For knowledge management to be successful, the corporate culture needs to be adapted to encourage the creation, sharing, and distribution of knowledge within the organization. Knowledge Organizations: What Every Manager Should Know provides insight into how organizations can best accomplish this goal. Liebowitz and Beckman provide the information companies need for evaluating and planning the steps and processes that will transform their existing organization infrastructure into a "knowledge-based" organization. This easy-to-read guide includes many vignettes, examples, and short cases of organizations involved in knowledge management.

This open access book makes a contribution to our understanding of one of the social challenges facing many western nations i.e. the challenge of an ageing population. It specifically addresses the issue of competence among older employees. Others have studied ageing populations in terms of the economic burden or the pressure on healthcare services and generally view the rising numbers of seniors more as a challenge than an opportunity. In this book, authors discuss ways of gaining positive benefits from our ageing and more experienced work force.

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself with the master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

This book offers a structured framework for critical thinking and decision making that shows how to use hindsight, insight, and foresight to navigate through complexity. Every organization and every person faces rapid change and complexity. Contextual intelligence – understanding fully the context in which one is operating – teaches the reader how to navigate that complexity and respond appropriately in the face of change (expected and unexpected). The Three-Dimensional (3D) ThinkingTM framework helps structure critical thinking by showing how to appropriately bring past experience, present intuition, and future ambiguity– in other words: hindsight, insight, and foresight – to bear on any given problem. Kutz offers a way to rationally organize difficult concepts such as complexity, tacit knowledge, and synchronicity into usable and understandable language, but more importantly teaches the reader how to apply these concepts in a very practical and meaningful way with measurable and tangible outcomes. The book also describes in detail 12 behaviors associated with contextual intelligence. Four behaviors are associated with hindsight, four behaviors are associated with insight, and four behaviors are associated with foresight. The book takes the reader through the 12 behaviors and how they relate to 3D Thinking. Cases and anecdotes are used generously to provide examples. Chapters are followed by critical thinking questions and questions related to the cases in the chapters. Furthermore, questions and practical tools are introduced that help the reader assess and determine their level of contextual intelligence.