The first section of this book was designed to help you see your business as a knowledge factory. This section outlines three critical management concepts that you will need to add to your toolkit in order to get the best results possible from your knowledge factory: networks, orchestration, and innovation.

The rising importance of knowledge is changing the balance of power in today’s organizations. Because they are dependent on the knowledge of their employees and stakeholders, organizations have to learn to find ways to encourage knowledge to flow from the bottom to the top of the organization as well as from the outside in. This dynamic also changes the role of the manager. Leadership is no longer about giving commands (if it ever was). It is now much more a question about facilitating the work of broad network of employees, partners and stakeholders. But it is still about getting results.

This section will help you organize your work as a manager of a knowledge organization. It will answer questions that include:

• How does work get done in the knowledge enterprise?
• What’s the role of the manager in this enterprise?
• Why is innovation so important today?
• How can you plan for innovation when you don’t know the outcome?

Most of the readers of this book already manage knowledge workers of some kind. But you are probably doing it without a full set of tools and techniques. This section will arm you with tools that can make your job easier and your results more effective. As with all the chapters in this book, we describe the knowledge era tools in contrast to their industrial era counterparts. Please do not think that we are advocating the replacement of these core concepts, but rather the addition of a knowledge era equivalent.

The truth is that all managers in the 20th century will live and work in two worlds, the tangible and the intangible. The intangible requires new tools and approaches. But the tangible side of business is not going away. One of the major management challenges of the 21st century will be to find the right balance between the tangible and intangible, the top down and the bottom up, and the inside out and outside in.

Put these ideas to work today: visit our download center or purchase the book.