ABSTRACT
Immediately after the open house meeting in which I use the Yemen story to explain knowledge management without the scaffolding of abstract analysis, I grab my bags, make a dash in a taxi for Dulles airport, and board a plane for a conference in London where I am to make a presentation. As the plane lumbers down the runway and then ascends into the air, I feel as if all the issues, problems, and forces with which I have been struggling inside the organization are beginning to dwindle into insignificance far below me on the ground. I settle into my seat for the compressed nighttime of a transatlantic flight, and take out a book that I have brought with me for the journey. The first sentence reads:
The words set my mind whirling. Certainly they bear on the issues with which I am wrestling. But oblique? And subjective? I have been trained for decades to believe that such orientations are anathema, approaches to be shunned, not embraced. Surely, objective is better than subjective and direct is better than oblique? Had not Aristotle in ancient Greece several thousand years ago established these basics?
