Leveraging the Power of Knowledge

Learning Organization
The learning organization is "an organization which facilitates the learning of all its members and continuously transforms itself."8
Leveraging the Power of Knowledge
Learning is the key competency required by any organization that wants to survive and thrive in the new knowledge economy. Market champions keep asking learning questions, keep learning how to do things better, and keep spreading that knowledge throughout their organization. Learning provides the catalyst and the intellectual resource to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Knowledge organizations obtain competitive advantage from continuous learning, both individual and collective. In organizations with a well established knowledge management system, learning by the people within an organization becomes learning by the organization itself. The changes in people's attitudes are reflected in changes in the formal and informal rules that govern the organization's behavior.

International management

Alexander was the first man; in the known history who established the first supply line for the business form Macedon to India. Then they were Mongols; who clear the whole road for business from Baghdad to China. Accordingly international business is not a new concept for the world that just came with WTO (World Trade Organization). However 16^th century Adim Smith's theory of "Absolute Advantage" gave a boost to trade internationally for import those things that u can't make efficiently and export those goods that no one can make efficiently other then yourself.  Recado came up with a new idea for the international trade that not just on absolute advantage also keep in mind the "Comparative Advantage", that u can gain to sale those goods in which u r best according to your productivity.

Beyond the theories, breakthrough inventions made information and even transfer of physical goods so easy than ever. From Japan to United State anything can reach in less than 24 hours and information from the same place to all over the world in even less than second. These inventions reduce the differences between countries and boundaries are becoming blurred. China can sell its product in all over the world. Pakistan can get maximum reward for the best quality cotton and also can buy cheap Japanese cars even in Pakistan. In the long run free trade is best in country interest.

Stress Management

There are two things all managers have in common-the 24-hour day and the annoying need to sleep. Without the sleeping, 24 hours might be enough. With it, there is no way to get everything done. After years of trying to vanquish demon sleep and the temptation to relax, many researchers tried different approaches, to put it this way: "Slow down or kiss you good-bye."
Struck by this imagery, RICARDO SEMLER gave a way to manage time and cut the work load to less than 24 hours. The first step is to overcome five myths:

• Results are proportional to efforts
• Quantity of work is more important than quality
• The present restructuring requires longer working hours temporarily.
• No one else can do it right
• This problem is urgent

The real difference between "important" and "urgent" is the difference between thoughtfulness and panic. Those are the myths. The second step is to master my eight cures:

• Set an hour to leave the office and obey it blindly.
• Take half a day, maybe even an entire Saturday, to rummage through that mountain of paper in your office and put it in piles.
• In dealing with Pile, always start with the most difficult or the most time-consuming.
• Buy another waste paper basket.
• Ask yourself Sloan's question about every lunch and meeting invitation.
• Give yourself time to think.
• About the telephone, my practical but subversive advice is: Don't return calls.
• Close your door.

(Reference: RICARDO SEMLER guide to stress management)

Knowledge Management in the Future

Management ideas reach a point in their trajectories where typically one of three outcomes occurs. The ideas become embedded in practice. They go away or fail to gain traction. Or they hobble along in a marginal way.

The quality movement is a good example of the first outcome, where we see quality processes, such as quality assurance departments, embedded in practice. There is already some evidence that this is occurring in knowledge management, where ‘‘smart systems’’ assemble collective knowledge and make it available to employees—for example, the databases used by call center agents and claims processing techniques used by insurance companies. However, it is also possible that knowledge management as we currently understand it will fade in influence, perhaps because of missed chances or, more likely, because organizations have already spent too much on technology systems, believing those were the solutions to their knowledge challenges.

For the long term, we believe a focus on knowledge and learning is the most essential issue for any organization. We may see the merging of learning, which has traditionally been HR-based, and knowledge management, which has been rooted more in IT and strategy. Certainly many others assert that knowledge and learning are mainstays of organizational performance. Among the most recent to advocate this view is a Columbia University economics professor, Joseph Stiglitz. He has argued that the appropriation of global ideas and the ability to search, filter, and socialize knowledge are the most important tasks for global organizations today. Take it from a Nobel Prize winner: this issue is here to stay. (For further detail read Ikujiro Nonaka.)