ABSTRACT
The importance of working smarter As long ago as 1963 Kenneth Lynn, the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, forecasted, ‘the day is coming when the “knowledge industry” will occupy the same role in the American economy that the railroad industry did a hundred years ago... ’ (Daedalus, p. 469). That day is now here. As a consequence, organizations are rushing to become learning organizations, to tap into and mobilize the ‘smarts’ of management and staff. However, as Tom Peters points out in Liberation Management (1992, p. 385), ‘most of the talk about learning in organizations is maddeningly abstract or vague - and falls short on the specifics’. That is, while we are urged to work smarter, we are not given any structures for identifying intelligence (s) or mobilizing intelligence (s).
