ABSTRACT
Someone once said that being aware that a tomato is actually a fruit rather than a vegetable is knowledge, but that understanding that you should not put a tomato in your fruit salad is wisdom. This is an amusing and rather limited way of describing wisdom, but it is a sentiment getting to the idea that knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom, although they are related. On the strength of this observation it is necessary to point out that a knowledge economy and knowledge management do not in and of themselves provide wisdom. This observation is the starting point for this book. Going further, we also take the idea that there is a problem when we have a plenitude of knowledge in the absence of wisdom. It is a central purpose of this book, then, to address the problem of knowledge in the absence of wisdom and to tease out the social and, particularly, the communication practices needed in management to get past simply accumulating knowledge and closer to fostering wise practice.
