B201 Business Organisations and their Environments

The importance of social networks is highlighted by Rob Cross, Andrew Parker, Laurence Prusak, and Stephen P. Borgatti, who recently found that “despite easy access to a world class knowledge management system and other accessible information sources, 85% of the managers [they studied] indicated [they got] information that had an impact on the success of a project from their personal network.”

Estee Solomon Gray, formerly of Xerox, and John Seely Brown, director of the Palo Alto Research Center and chief scientist for Xerox, note that “the real genius of organizations is the informal, impromptu, often inspired ways that real people solve real problems in ways that formal processes can’t anticipate. When you’re competing on knowledge, the name of the game is improvisation, not standardization.”

Ed Schein at MIT defines culture as the sum of solutions to yesterday’s problems.