Thursday, August 04, 2005

4 August 2005 - Websites

These are a couple of websites which are going to be helpful to me to findout what KM is all about. I need to find out some history on it, i.e. when it first started etc etc.

http://www.kmworld.com/publications/whitepapers/KM4/

http://www.providersedge.com/kma/km_bibliography.htm

http://www.icasit.org/km/resources/kmcases.htm

http://www.epssworld.com/wedweb/kmsite.htm

http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/knowledge-management

http://www.ejkm.com/index.htm

http://www.tlainc.com/issue1.htm

http://www.skyrme.com/insights/22km.htm

http://www.skyrme.com/resource/kmres.htm

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

13 July 2005

Not trying to offend anybody.

My wife dresses to kill. She also cooks the same way.
-Henny Youngman


My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then met.
-Rodney Dangerfield

A good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong.
-Milton Berle

I bought my wife a new car. She called and said,"There was water in the carburetor." I asked her , "Where's the car?" She replied,"In the lake."
-Henny Youngman

The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.
-Henny Youngman

After a quarrel, a wife said to her husband, "You know, I was a fool when I married you." The husband replied, "Yes, dear, but I was in love and didn't notice."

When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.

I haven't spoken to my wife in 18 months - I don't like to interrupt her.

My girlfriend told me I should be more affectionate. So I got myself two girlfriends.

A man said his credit card was stolen but he decided not to report it since the thief was spending much less than his wife did.

Man is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.

A little boy asked his father, "Daddy, how much does it cost to get married?"

The father replied, "I don't know son, I'm still paying."

Young Son: Is it true, Dad, that in some parts of Africa, a Man doesn't know his wife until he marries her?
Dad: That happens in every country, son.

Then there was a man who said, "I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; then it was too late.

A man placed an ad in the classifieds: "Wife wanted." The next day he received a hundred letters. They all said the same: "You can have mine."

A woman was telling her friend, "I made my husband a millionaire." "And what was he before you married him?" asked the friend. "A billionaire." she replied.

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

It's not true that married men live longer than single men. It only seems longer.
Losing a wife can be very hard. In my case, it was almost impossible.

Just think, if it weren't for marriage, men would go through life thinking they had no faults at all.

Men who have pierced ears are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewellery.

The most effective way to remember your wife's birthday is to forget it once.

12 July 2005

Jelinek, Mariann, Linda Smircich and Paul Hirsch. 1983. “Introduction: A Code of Many Colors.” Aministrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3, Organizational Culture (September). 331 – 338.

· Pettigrew (1979) noted that culture comes with ‘a family of concepts’ like symbol, language, social drama, and ritual that highlight organizing (rather than ‘organization’) as the major focus.
· Culture – another word for social reality – is both product and process, the sharper of human interaction and the outcome of it, continually created and recreated by people’s on going interactions.
· Culture is defined as ‘a system of meanings that accompany the myriad of behaviours and practices recognised as a distinct way of life.
· Culture enables organizations to function.

Gregory, Kathleen L.. 1983. Native-view paradigms: Multiple cultures and culture conflicts in organizations. Aministrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3, Organizational Culture (September). 359-376

· Within our own societies organization members similarly engange in rituals, pass along corporate myths and stories and use arcane (known to few) jargon and that these informal practices may foster or hinder management’s goals for the organization (baker, 1980; Schwartz and Davis, 1981; Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Peters and Waterman, 1982)
· Subgroups with different occupational, divisional, ethnic, or other cultures approach organizational interactions with their own meanings and senses of priorities. Ethnocentrism, the tendency to take for granted one’s own cultural view and to evaluate others’ behaviour in terms of it, increases the tendency for misunderstandings and conflict occur.
· Culture is defined as learned ways coping with experience.
· Spradley and McCurdy’s (1975:5) – the acquired knowledge people use to interpret experience and generate social behaviour.
· Werner and Topper (1979:34) – system of knowledge that explains the social and physical universe and provides plans and decisions for coping.
· People participate in many groups and acquire culture in all experiences (e.g. as family members, residents, citizens, employees)
· Organizations that lack integration may be comprised of members acting from numerous internally consistent but externally conflicting cultures.

Lakomski, Gabriele. 2005. Managing without leadership: Towards a theory of organizational functioning. Elsevier Ltd.

· Schein (1992). It is organizations’s culture that causes resistance and that needs changing.
· The prime mover of change is the leader, who transform the current stagnating culture into a productive one.
· Following Smircich’s (1983) discussion, culture-as-independent-variable is a feature characteristic of comparative (cross cultural) management studies, where it is considered as a background factor that helps determine variation in managerial and employee practices and attitude across countries.
· Culture in this management persepective is imported into the organization by the members and subsequent ‘shows’ itself in the ways they act and the attitudes they display.
· A variant of the culture-as-independent-variable concept is the belief that organizations themselves create cultural phenomena in form of organizational rituals, stories, ceromonies, legends and myths, often to do with the remarkable features and feats of the organization’s founding father/leader.
· Culture is the ‘social glue’ that holds the organization together through members’ shared beliefs and ideals.
· Culture is no longer an add-on, something an organization possesses, but is considered as something an organization is.
· Cultures are created by the human mind – understanding of culture is explicitly epistemological, in that organization is understood as the product of human cognition.
· The managing of culture is acknowledge as a difficult task requiring quite different means depending on which aspect is stressed.
· Krober and Kluckhohn’s (1952) traditional anthropological definition is widely accepted in management literature:
o Culture consists of patterns, explicit an implicit of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting and distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts: the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on one hand, be considered as products of action; on the other, as conditioning elements of future action (as cited in Holden, 2002, p. 27).
· The mental programs we carry in our heads; that is, the ‘patterns of thinking, feeling and acting’ developed in interaction with our environments, determine our views of the world and make us different from one another (Hofstede work 1984, 1991 and 2001) – software of mind
· Hofstede, 1991 p.5) culture is defined as the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.
· Schein, 1992, p.5) culture is viewed as
o …. The accumulated shared learning of a given group, covering behaviourial, emotional, and cognitive elements of the group members’ total psychological functioning. For shared learning to occur, there must be a history of shared experience, which in turn implies some stability of membership in the group. Given such stability and a shared history, the human need for parsimony, consistency, and meaning will cause the various shared elements to form into patterns that eventually can be called a culture (Schein, 1992, p.10).
· Culture of group can be defined as:
o A pattern of shared basic assumption that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. (Schein, 1992, p.12)
· The relationship between culture and leadership:
o Two sides of the same coin in that leaders first create cultures when they create groups and organisations. Once culture exists, they determine that criteria for leadership and thus determine who will or will not be leader, But if cultures become dysfunctional, it is the unique function of leadership to perceive the functional and dysfunctional elements of the existing culture and to mange cultural evolution and change in such a way that the group can survive in a changing environment. (Schein, 1992, p.15)

Holden, Nigel. 2002. Cross-cultural management: A knowledge management persepective. Prentice Hall.

· Culture is a problem area for management.
· Edward Burnett Tylor’s (1871) definition:
o Culture… is that complex whoel which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. (Encylopedia Britannica, 2000)
· Culture referring to an aspect of a national or ethnic grouping, including summations of characteristics with reference to distinctive (culture specified management style of negotiating style)
· Culture referring to the special qualities an organization (corporate culture)

Monday, July 11, 2005

11 July 2005

Need to look for some defination for work culture. There are 3 different catogories of cultures in organisations,
  • namely inter culture - same group of people belonging to a specific race;
  • intra culture - people of different races;
  • and cross cultural - expatriates working with locals.
We have these kinds of scenarios in Malaysia. In these cultures we will also have to see other aspects such as:
  • level of education - we have local graduates, foreign graduates and those who have not experienced university education;
  • some of the workers have gone to national type schools, i.e. Chinese, Indian and Religious schools, they see work differently; and
  • in organisations seniority and gender too play a role where the young are seen as ambitious and energetic compared to the seniors, as for some ladies, they see work as just trying to add to the household income.
Dont get me wrong in these issues, there is some reality in all of these. Everything mentioned above will have to be justified, if some sort of work has been done on the above, I will be grateful is somebody can share it with me. There are definitely more issues to be discussed as the list is non exhaustive.

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

29 June 2005

Had difficulties in waking up. My throat was giving me some problems. Received a call from a friend in Brisbane who intended to visit Melbourne. Told him that he is mad to come at this time of the year. It is getting very cold and even a thick jacket is not helpful in the morning. It is sunny now as I sit downloading some stuff in relation to organisational culture. Will have to go through it to prepare something for the supervisor to argue. To me each organisation has a set of cultural rules and one has to get adapted to it or else......

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

22 June 2005

Getting ready to go for the Writing Skills workshop. Went to the Bank to do some business which I was earlier denied. I had wanted to send some money but they refused me, citing reasons they dont do TT after 3.30 pm and today they give me call and saying they will do it for free. Why? Because I rang their consumer relation dept and got a clarification that there are no such rules. Hah! Serve them right.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

21 June 2005

I was getting ready to go home and then to my work station to look for some stuff on work culture in Malaysia. Sad to say not much research has been done in relation to this. I am waiting for some help from my teachers back home, might be busy with kids back in university, getting them ready for examination.
Life is not easy when you have to do research on your home country while sitting miles away from her. Really miss her very much, when you are away only then you appreciate all this. Feel like finishing fast and fly away from here.