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The Wealth of Knowledge
Thomas A. Stewart Currency (Doubleday) New York, NY 2001 379 pp. $27.50
Keywords Intellectual capital, Knowlege workers, Measurement
Thomas Stewart's most recent book on intellectual capital, The Wealth of Knowledge, asserts knowledge is the most important resource for any business operating in today's post-industrial marketplace. The industrial market focus had the aim of managing prediction. Today, managing knowledge is the aim because predictive environments are no longer the pervasive characteristic of the marketplace. In a nutshell, managing knowledge - its processes, its products, its creation - are the aims of businesses, since all of these aspects of knowledge directly impact on the nature of marketing services and extending the life of products.
Stewart's book is framed into three major sections. Part I, "The theory of a knowledge business", briefly describes and defines the nature of a knowledge economy; Part II, "The disciplines of a knowledge business", details out the parameters of managing knowledge; and Part Ill, "The performance of a knowledge business", ventures into the realm of actually measuring knowledge returns and productivity. Part II is the substantive core of the book and this review will accordingly focus on that part of the book. However, a brief descriptive on Parts I and II will be provided before diving into the particulars of managing knowledge found in Part 11.
Part I of this fascinating book provides a quick review of the paradigm shifts that have occurred in the economy. Perhaps the most important chapter in Part I is Chapter 1, which provides a definition of the three pillars of the knowledge economy. First, knowledge is what businesses today buy, sell and do; second, knowledge is an asset to be managed; third, given that knowledge is an asset and it is what is bought, sold, and done, new strategies, vocabularies and techniques are in order so that managing the asset is possible.
Knowledge, as Stewart defines it, is relational and highly dependent on context. For example, information can be data or communicating meaning, depending on the context and the user. Knowledge, then, is basically three parts: what is known by employees; what is known...