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How have Japanese companies become world market leaders in the motor vehicle and electronics industries, among others? Precisely what is the secret of these success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, will be the first to tie up the success of Japanese companies with their ability to generate new knowledge and make use of it to create successful products and technology. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi offer an inside check out how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The creators point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, within manuals and methods, and tacit knowledge, discovered only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers give attention to explicit knowledge. JAPAN, on the other hand, give attention to tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the main element with their success - the Japanese have discovered how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To describe how this is done - and illuminate Japanese business routines as they do so - the creators range between Greek school of thought to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management experts, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies attracted from such organizations as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For example, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully programmed bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading system, a software programmer apprenticed herself with the get good at baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit knowledge of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the technicians. Furthermore, the creators show that, to generate knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but instead what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between your ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. Even as we make the turn into the 21st century, a new population is growing. Peter Drucker message or calls it the "knowledge population," one that is drastically not the same as the "industrial population," and one where acquiring and applying knowledge can be key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge can be the main element to sustaining a competitive advantages in the future.As the competitive environment and customer tastes changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese organizations that reveal how to generate knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.
