Top 10 Reading List on Knowledge Management

If you want to get started on understanding knowledge management the following ten books are your best place to start. I've listed them in the order I think is most valuable; I've also included brief comments about each book.

Working Knowledge : How Organizations Manage What They Know
Davenport, Thomas H.
Prusak, Laurence
Harvard Business School Pr
1997
0-87584-655-6

Tom and Larry's book is your best place to start. It's a comprehensive map of the state of the KM world circa 1998. It establishes a useful working vocabulary and conceptual framework for the topic. Geared for an executive audience with pointers to lots of other material.

Intellectual Capital : The New Wealth of Organizations
Stewart, Thomas A.

Doubleday
May 1, 1997
0-385-48228-0

Tom Stewart provides another excellent survey of knowledge management in the wild. I wrote a review of it for Context Magazine when it came out. More appropriate to a senior executive audience and a little lighter on what do I do on Monday than Working Knowledge.

The Knowledge-Creating Company : How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation
Nonaka, Ikujiro

Oxford Univ Pr (Trade)
1995
0-19-509269-4

Nonaka and Takeuchi's book provides a more extensive theoretical argument for how organization's create knowledge and how that links to economic value. Muchm more academic in tone and a bit tougher reading. If you nly read one chapter, read Chapter 3 on their theory of knowledge creation.

Wellsprings of Knowledge
Leonard-Barton, D.

Harvard Business School Press
1995
0-87584-612-2

Another somewhat more academic book. (Although you might not know it from how well it's written. Dorothy was my thesis adviser and used to be a journalist before she was an academic. She's a brutal editor.) Wellsprings digs deeper into how organizational processes can help or hinder the creation of new knowledge. Lots of good data from the real world.

These next four books examine various aspects of how to make knowledge management work in practice. They begin to drill deeper into specific practices and issues that need to be addressed. Baird and Henderson's book is a nice counterbalance to the general tone of many other KM writings that seem to imply that KM is good in itself. They look quite systematically to how to link knowledge and performance. Nancy Dixon's Common Knowledge also digs into this issue by focusing on how to make knowledge transfer work better inside organizations

The Social Life of Information offers a series of reflections on information and learning in organizations. Finally, Wegner's book on Communities of Practice focuses in on what is probably the central organizational issue in effective knowledge management.

The Knowledge Engine: How to Create Fast Cycles of Knowledge-to-Performance and Performance-to-Knowledge
Baird, Lloyd
Henderson, John C.
Berrett-Koehler
May 10, 2001
1-57675-104-X

Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know
Dixon, Nancy M.

Harvard Business School Pr
2000
0-87584-904-0

The Social Life of Information
Brown, John Seely
Harvard Business School Pr
February 2000
0-87584-762-5

Communities of Practice : Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives)
Wenger, Etienne

Cambridge Univ Pr (Short)
August 1998
0-521-43017-8

The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Stewart, Thomas A.

Doubleday
December 26, 2001
0-385-50071-8

Tom Stewart's latest book updates his earlier one and goes deeper into how to. He also makes an interesting case against KM in an effort to refute some of the recent techno-centric takes on KM.

In Good Company : How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work
Cohen, Don
Prusak, Laurence
Harvard Business School Pr
January 2001
0-87584-913-X
In Good Company isn't directly about knowledge management. Instead it's a reflection on how much more important social capital is likely to become in knowledge-centric companies.