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My next book

Posted by Rene Jansen Tue, 20 Sep 2005 12:48:00 GMT

Last week I was on a friends birthday party. I chatted for a while with his sister, who was considering to do a PhD research. She asked me whether I felt my PhD research had been beneficial or not. I thought about her question. I did spent quite some nights, weekends and oh yeah, days of course, on my research. I obliged myself to work every evening at least half an hour, even if I was tired and wanted to relax, and I permitted myself 2 evenings of fun per week (like playing in my band). As we all know now, I managed to finalize my PhD research in about 2 years, doing it in part time next to my commercial job (again, thanks to the help from all collegues and students from the University of Amsterdam who supported me, and thanx as well to Capgemini, Bortiboll Communications and Bit-IC who funded part of the research).

So you could say, I could have done a lot of other things during those late night hours. Was it worth it? Yes, definitely, I said to my friend's sister. I think I owe quite some interesting projects I worked on over the last years (i.e. the DHL web site) to my PhD thesis and the authority my research gives me.

However, I think if I could do it again, I'm not sure if I would go again for a PhD thesis, or rather write a business book (like I wrote earlier with Martijn Hoogeveen and later one with Monique van Berkel). It is easier to write a business book, since you can focus on your message and the practical relevance of your message, instead of the focus on scientific relevance. And suddenly a thought came to mind: it is about time to write my next book! I should start writing about my bPerform thoughts. About the business impact of Web2.0. What are the problems that managers of knowledge intensive firms run into. And what are the problems that individual knowledge workers run into? I realised that the current books on knowledge intensive organisations don't cover the whole story I want to tell (I realized myself how difficult it is to find good literature for teaching my courses at the University of Amsterdam, remember, the course where we started a nice blog about all aspects of managing information and knowledge). So, OK, let me think: I plan to interview, let's say, 20 managers and 20 individual knowledge workers. And I am going to ask them questions like:

• how important is knowledge for you to survive, and to create competitve advantage?
• what are the main challenges facing you as a knowledge intensive firm?
• how do you currently manage knowledge? What goes well, what needs improvement?
• how do you benefit on a strategic level from ideas and inspiration of your knowledge workers?
• what support do internal and external systems offer you, and is their support satisfying?
• how do you deal with the fact that knowledge workers are professionals that want to manager their own live and their own work, and that they often share knowledge in peer groups outside the company

And I realise myself that these questions are just a beginning, I need to think more about the real important questions. I need to define some objectives, hypotheses, a research framework... Damn, it's gona be another PhD thesis!! But... With a more practical focus, although I consider to write some scientific articles based on this research as well. Cool! This gives me energy! And it is important for all of us to better understand what is happening in the knowledge economy, so let's go for it! Any suggestions for questions? For people to interview? Just let me know....