Acknowledgments
The actual writing of the book was only a very small part of developing the ideas behind it. It was a much longer process, and many people have contributed over the years. The first person I want to thank is Gloria Miller, my manager back in 1997, who gave me the freedom to pursue this somewhat unusual project I had in mind. A lot of credit for developing a “knowledge management” mind goes to those leading and participating in the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management. During my participation from 1999 to 2003, I was fortunate to meet David Snowden, Eric Lesser, Mike Fontaine, Rob Cross, Don Cohen, Steven Denning, and many others. Larry Prusak’s great story-filled keynotes were highlights during that time, lighting my own passion for the topic. In combination with the numerous discussions I had with those from other organizations (ranging from the U.S. Army to the World Bank), I always returned home filled with the ideas and energy needed to push forward on my own initiatives. If you get started with knowledge management, you can easily feel somewhat isolated. So reaching out to experts outside your own organization is very important.
The next group that gave me that type of inspiration was the Harvard Learning Innovation Laboratory (LILA). Special thanks go to David Perkins and Daniel Wilson, who invited me to LILA and led such an exceptional group of practitioners and researchers. Robin Athey, Brigitte Lippmann, Carlota Vollhardt, Fred Vail, Peter Engström, Nat Welch, and Mike Prevou are only a few of those to whom I am very thankful for ideas and feedback. I also met Etienne Wenger again at LILA after listening to him at what I consider my first real knowledge management presentation at a Chicago conference in 1998. It was great to be able to personally discuss it with him at LILA meetings. I want to thank Tom Davenport for inviting me to the Babson Working Knowledge Research Center, where I met a group of people from whom I learned so much. At Babson I was able to reconnect with Larry Prusak and a number of the IKM members; I also met a range of very inspiring knowledge management thinkers, like Book Manville.
In the last few years I connected with knowledge management groups in Germany and Switzerland. Thanks for some great discussions to Gerold Riempp, Stefan Smolnik, and Reimar Palte from the European Business School and to Beat Knechtli, Olivier Zaech, and Pavel Kraus from the Swiss Knowledge Management forum.
A special thanks goes to my team at SAS, who helped me get the main initiatives off the ground and give their input and feedback: Britta Lerch, Ana Lopez-Echevarria, Victoria Vaca, Paul Higgins, Kerstin Lambert, Anja Häse, Nic Handschuh, Stephanie Salomo, Meike Kalkowsky, and Daniel Kummer. My frequent discussions with Louise Smith, our knowledge manager for the Asia-Pacific region, have been invaluable over the years. Curt Yeo in the United States played a similar role for some time. I also want to thank my dear friend Thomas Bock, who not only provided me with a “sales view” but also served as a great devil’s advocate at many occasions.
Especially when writing a book as a single author, it is very important to have good reviewers. A big thank-you for great comments goes to Hannu Ritvanen, Rasmus Staerke, David Biesack, Dee Stribling, and others. Thank you to Holger Ideler for offering me a banking perspective on the topic in a number of pizza sessions here in Zürich. As I am not a native English speaker, John Kohl’s book The Global English Style Guide proved to be very useful.
Thank you to Stacey Hamilton, my editor at SAS, who led me very smoothly through this adventure of writing my first book and provided such a great interface to Wiley, the publisher. Thanks to all those at Wiley who made it happen. I am also grateful to Scott Isaacs for supporting the idea of the book and giving me the opportunity to start the project.
Last but not least, a really big thank-you goes to my family. My wife, Inge, not only allowed me to vanish weekend after weekend and even holiday time behind the Mac but also gave a lot of moral support over all those years. And my college-age daughters, Alexandra and Franziska, did the same via video-calls from a number of places around Europe.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.