Johan Roos

Measuring your company's intellectual performance

It is individuals who own and control the knowledge of organizational members, the chief source of competitive advantage. Intangible assets often tell one more about the future earnings of the comp ...

Knowing in Firms: Understanding, Managing, and Measuring Knowledge

Introduction - Georg von Krogh, Johan Roos and Dirk Kleine PART ONE: UNDERSTANDING KNOWLEDGE IN ORGANIZATIONS Tough Questions on Knowledge Management - Thomas Bertels and Charles M Savage Future Research into Knowledge Management - Markus Venzin, Georg von Krogh and Johan Roos Knowledge, Organizations and Competition - Frank Blackler, Norman Crump and Seonaidh McDonald Organizational Knowledge and Learning - Rodrigo Magalh[ti]aes Knowledge and the Concept of Trust - Lars Huemer, Georg von Krogh and Johan Roos PART TWO: MANAGING AND MEASURING KNOWLEDGE IN ORGANIZATIONS Three Tales of Knowledge-Creating Companies - Ikujiro Nonaka, Katsuhiro Umemoto and Keigo Sasaki Knowledge Enablers - Kazuo Ichijo, Georg von Krogh and Ikujiro Nonaka Errors and Learning in Organizations - Salvatore Vicari and Gabriele Troilo The Knowledge Spiral - J[um]urgen Sch[um]uppel, G[um]unter M[um]uller-Stewens and Peter Gomez Knowledge as a Strategic Resource - Gilbert Probst, Bettina B[um]uchel and Steffen Raub Competing with Intellectual Capital - Donald A Marchand The Learning-Knowledge-Value Cycle - Valery Kanevsky and Tom Housel

Managing Knowledge: Perspectives on Cooperation and Competition

Introduction - Georg von Krogh and Johan Roos PART ONE: REPRESENTATIONISM: TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO VIEWING KNOWLEDGE, KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER AND COOPERATIVE STRATEGIES Representationism - John Harald Aadne, Georg von Krogh, Johan Roos The Traditional Approach to Cooperative Strategies Imitation of Knowledge - Georg von Krogh and Johan Roos A Sociology of Knowledge Perspective Towards a Theory of Knowledge Transfer in a Cooperative Context - Ken Wathne, Johan Roos and Georg von Krogh The Impact of Individual and Organizational Learning on Formation and Management of Organizational Cooperation - Marjorie Lyles, Georg von Krogh, Johan Roos and Dirk Kleine Arguments on Knowledge and Competence - Georg von Krogh and Johan Roos Knowledge-Based Strategic Change - Thorvald H[di]aerem, Georg von Krogh and Johan Roos Restructuring - Georg von Krogh, Johan Roos and Thorvald H[di]aerem Avoiding the Phantom Limb Effect PART TWO: ANTI-REPRESENTATIONISM: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER IN ORGANIZATIONAL COOPERATION An Essay on Corporate Epistemology - Georg von Krogh, Johan Roos and Ken Slocum Knowledge Creation through Cooperative Experimentation - Salvatore Vicari, Georg von Krogh, Johan Roos and Volker Mahnke A Note on the Epistemology of Globalizing Firms - Georg von Krogh, Johan Roos and Georg Yip Conversation Management for Knowledge Development - Georg von Krogh and Johan Roos Afterword - Georg von Krogh and Johan Roos An Agenda for Practice and Future Research

A perspective on knowledge, competence and strategy

Although the idea that competencies are underlying sustainable competitive advantages is central, there has been no thorough investigation into the very nature of competencies in the strategic mana ...

Images of Strategy

Images underlying strategy tend to be simplistic, unimodal, visual abstractions. We suggest that multimodal imagery of strategy, which brings together verbal/narrative, visual/imagistic, and kinaesthetic/haptic nodes, can significantly enrich peoples understanding of their organization and its strategy.

Towards a new model of strategy-making as serious play

A new model of strategy-making as play is presented in response to increasing calls for a deeper theory of strategy-making. First an elaboration of the construct of strategic imagination is offered, describing three distinct, but interrelated forms of imagination: descriptive, creative, and challenging. Strategic Imagination is defined as an emergent property of a complex interplay between the three kinds of imagination. Then, extending the work of the planning and design schools, the model describes the complex social dynamic of strategy-making itself. Applying the notion of play from anthropology and cognitive development, the strategy-making process is described as a three-phase play process. The three phases, constructing to stimulate new ideas, story telling to share meaning, and deep engagement to assimilate new directions, are described. Finally some directions for strategy-making practice improvement are offered.

From Metaphor to Practice in the Crafting of Strategy

This article explores how the link between the hand and the mind might be exploited in the making of strategy. Using Mintzberg’s image of a potter undergoing iterative and recursive learning and knowledge-building processes as a point of departure, the authors develop a three-level theoretical schema, progressing from the physiological to the psychological to the social to trace the consequences of the hand-mind link. To illustrate their theoretical schema, the authors present an illustration case of managers from a large telecommunications firm experimenting with a process for strategy making in which they actively use their hands to construct representations of their organization and its environment. The authors conclude that new and potent forms of strategy making might be attained if the fundamental human experience of using one’s hands is put in the service of all kinds of organizational learning.

Collective Virtuosity in Organizations: A Study of Peak Performance in an Orchestra

The purpose of this paper is to build theory on peak performance at the group level. Peak performance transcends ordinary performance and is associated with a subjective experience in which one loses a sense of time and space as well as feels great joy and bliss. We chose to study this phenomenon at the group level through a methodology of participant observation in an orchestra. We found that groups can be transformed by their own performance in a reflexive process in which virtuosity, or individual peak performance, becomes collective. We offer a propositional model of collective virtuosity in organizations, and offer directions for further research.

‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ : Taking Play Seriously in Organizations

In response to the dominant logic that characterizes play as frivolous and only marginally relevant, this paper attempts to develop a theoretical framework that will allow play to be taken seriously in organizations. Psychological, sociological, anthropological and philosophical literature streams are reviewed to establish a coherent understanding of the emotional, social and cognitive benefits of play. A net of semantic distinctions is then introduced to differentiate play from work, and play is presented formally as imaginative, ethical and autotelic. This analysis is then embedded in the organizational research literature to show the implications of play with regard to strategic innovation, the management of uncertainty and continuous learning.

Beyond Text: Constructing Organizational Identity Multimodally

Organizational scholars have proposed a broad range of theoretical approaches to the study of organizational identity. However, empirical studies on the construct have relied on text-based organizational identity descriptions, with little exploration of multiple intelligences, emotions and individual/collective identity representations. In this paper, we briefly review the empirical literature on organizational identity, and propose a novel method for empirical study involving structured interventions in which management teams develop representations of the identities of their organizations using three-dimensional construction toy materials. Our study has five main implications. By engaging in a method that draws on multiple intelligences, participants in this study generated multifaceted and innovative representations of the identities of their organizations. The object-mediated, playful nature of the method provided a safe context for emotional expression. Because it involved the collection of both individual and collective-level data, the technique led to collective constructions of highly varying degrees of sharedness. Finally, the organizational identity representations integrated unconscious or tacit understandings, which led to the enactment of organizational change.