Critical Evaluation of Denning's Ideas

Patrick Lencioni is an American writer, who focuses on writing books particularly in relation to business and team management. He is best known for ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’, an allegory following the journey of DecisionTech’s new CEO, Katheryn Peterson. In this tale, Lencioni revels the basics of teamwork by creating a fictional business, in which is struggling to grow as a company, due to lack of commitment by its employees. The company fails to accept responsibilities and to come to any agreements, ultimately, resulting a plummeting disposition. Furthermore, throughout the fable, the five dysfunctions of a team become more evident, in which are, absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment avoidance of accountability and

Patrick Lenciono wrote about a fictional technological company named DecisionTech, Inc. to illustrate how dysfunctional teams hinder the growth in every faucet of a business operation. The story focuses on Kathryn, the new CEO, and her journey to fix the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the executive staff. Kathryn’s primary task is to establish a system of trust and teamwork within the executive team by destroying the five dysfunctions, absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results that cripple the potential of any team.

Lead with a Story is a book about the power of storytelling as a tool for leadership. In this book Paul Smith offers more than 100 stories leaders can use for 21 of the toughest challenges they face. It is full of practical wisdom on leadership and management that come to life through real world stories. He teaches the basics of storytelling, including examples and exercises.

Hislop, D. (2013). Knowledge management in organizations: A critical introduction (3rd ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Armenakis, Achilles A., and Arthur G. Bedeian. 1992. The role of metaphors in organizational change. Group and Organization Management, 17: 242-248.

Wood takes a candid approach as he illustrates each milepost with testimonies from his own personal and professional experiences. Wood begins the journey with a brief look at the tension within leadership. Wood (2011) argues, “True

Additionally, in his novel Squirrel INC., Stephen Denning states that “a story can communicate a company’s brand” (56). Also, “a personal story can communicate who you are” as an entity (54). We decided that a compilation of personal stories would be the best method to communicate the values and outcomes of the SDP, and therefore, show administrators how valuable the program is to people. Denning further supports this idea when he states that effective companies spark change when “Groups possess analogous ‘who we are’ stories, which are less about the leader’s personal experiences and attitudes and more about the joint experiences and attitudes of the people within the organization and their shared beliefs” (Denning 58). Therefore, the sections of the interviews we chose to include in the video help paint a picture of the organization as a whole. Also, we added in a few photos of the participants’ activities, so as to not only let our viewers hear the benefits of the program, but also see visual proof of how the program is a beneficial entity. Denning states that “In performing the story, the storyteller relives the story and makes it fresh” as if the viewers were there at those particular, specified moments (Denning 26). Our goal was to have our audience feel as though they were apart of each participants’ activities through the various photos. Furthermore, we decided to begin our video with a brief introduction into the program by one of the former chairs of the SDP, and what it essentially accomplishes because “a traditional narrative has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. The beginning of the story sets the context of the narratives” that follow it (50). We wanted to prepare our

Knowledge management (KM) is a relatively new concept that emerged 15 or 20 years ago and which presents knowledge as a process, rather as something that people have. Blacker (1995) himself talks of “knowing as a process”, thus something far more complex and ambiguous than the classical and cognitive views that we could have of knowledge. Moreover, this assumption implies, as we shall see, that management is not neutral or objective but that it is intertwined in power relations and social processes that help to achieve the KM’s goals

Firstly, an organization must be able to have a set of guiding principles that can be followed through KM. It therefore implies that knowledge management is a process that must be followed critically. Secondly, the principles must be applied selectively and appropriately. One of the factors to be considered is that there should be a clear definition of goals. This helps team members to develop a sense of direction that is important in the entire process. Secondly, management must be transparent to employees and other pertinent internal stakeholders. Thirdly, appropriate budgeting of the resources is of paramount importance, followed by effecting the allocation expeditiously (Jennex, 2008). Fourthly, it is of paramount importance to recruit an able team and promote internal and experienced employees as a way of encouraging them to be part of the company. Fifthly, there should be a defined structure of the knowledge management that can serve as a standard against which achievement can be measured (Jennex, 2008).

The second issue in gathering stories traces back to the concern of whether or not the participants are “able to tell the real story” (Creswell, 2008). At times, presenting the real story is dangerous to the participant because of the degree of detail and information provided as part of the story. For example,

Many large companies have resources dedicated to Knowledge Management, often as a part of 'Information Technology ' or 'Human Resource Management ' departments. Knowledge Management is a multi-billion dollar world wide market.

By creating a fictional company we can provide real life examples on ways of transferring the “why” into the “how.” Beginning with relevance, we discuss how strategies are turned into action, with examples of how a company can become and remain relevant within their market and their desired customer demographic.

Knowledge management comprises strategies and processes designed to identify, capture, value, leverage and share an organization’s intellectual assets to enhance its performance and competitiveness. It is a discipline that enable individuals, teams, organizations and communities to capture, store, share and apply their knowledge more collectively and systematically, to achieve their objectives. It is a tool required to manage knowledge and transfer of knowledge within an organization. Knowledge management is not only about managing the latest technology, tool or strategy but also managing the knowledge within the company and treating it as the most valuable asset for the success of the company.

KM is defined as the set of organized and regimented actions that can be taken to attain the maximum value from the knowledge available to it by an organization. A proper combination of organizational, social and administration motivation along with exploitation of apposite technology is required by knowledge management. Gathering, classify, store and spread all knowledge which the organization needs to both develop and progress is the idea of KM. To leverage and reuse knowledge resources that previously supply in the organization. As a result people will create best practices rather than reinvent the wheel KM deals with two types of knowledge, tacit and explicit as reported by Huergo (2006) and Jennex (2005).

Knowledge Management is defined as the process of capturing, distributing and effectively using knowledge (Davenport, 1994) 1. It can also be refer as a multi-disciplined method in order to accomplish organizational objectives by fully utilized and generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets 6. Knowledge Management focuses on the gaining, creating, and sharing knowledge and technical foundations that support them 2. According to Grey, knowledge management is an audit of “intellectual assets” that highlights unique resources, critical functions and potential deadlocks which prevent knowledge flows to the point of use. It protects intellectual assets from decaying, seeks opportunities to improve decisions, services and products through adding intelligence, increasing value and providing flexibility (Grey , n.d) 5. On top of that, knowledge management includes a range of planning and practices used in an organization to classify, create, distribute and enable adoption of intuitions and experiences.