Presentation by leading scholar Ikujiro Nonaka
Leading scholar Ikujiro Nonaka, well known for his pathbreaking book with co-author Hirotaka Takeuchi, The Knowledge-Creating Company, Oxford 1995, will be making a presentation at the Drucker School of Claremont Graduate University, on Monday February 12, 2007, 9:00 to 10:30 AM. His brief bio is below. Please reply to edie.young@cgu.edu to reserve a seat for his presentation.
The title of his presentation is From Knowledge to Wisdom: How Knowledge-Creating Companies are Bringing about Innovation through Phronesis-based Leadership. A brief description follows.
Analytical scientific knowledge (episteme) and technical knowledge (techne), the two virtues postulated by Aristotle, are often discussed in management literature. The most important (yet the least known) of his three virtues, however, is phronesis, which is often translated as practical wisdom, prudence, or ethics. It can be thought of as the virtuous habit of making decisions and taking actions that serve the common good.
His presentation will build on his earlier work on knowledge creation to discuss how knowledge can become wisdom, how innovation can emerge in a self-organizing manner, both through phronesis-based leadership.
Brief Bio:
Ikujiro Nonaka is Xerox Professor of Knowledge at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and a professor at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. He also is the Visiting Dean of the Center for Knowledge and Innovation Research (CKIR) at the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration and the founding dean of the Graduate School of Knowledge Science at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Nonaka received both his MBA and Ph.D. in business from the University of California at Berkeley and has long been one of Japan's foremost authorities on developing and using the intellectual capital of workers to create and expand business knowledge. With co-author Hirotaka Takeuchi, Professor Nonaka wrote The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation (Oxford: 1995), which was awarded the "Best Book of the Year in Business and Management" by the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division. The book introduced the issues of tacit and explicit knowledge, and also the important role of individuals in the creation of organizational knowledge. These views have gained a strong position in current management and organization theory and practice and resulted in a knowledge-based view of the firm.
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