Overview
Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management collects eight influential essays from the period when knowledge management was becoming a distinct management field. The anthology does not offer one unified method. Instead, it assembles complementary views of how organizations are redesigned by information, create knowledge, learn from experience, deepen professional capability, and make research more useful.
Several essays became enduring reference points. Peter F. Drucker considers the information-based organization; Ikujiro Nonaka explains the knowledge-creating company; David A. Garvin examines the learning organization; and Chris Argyris describes why highly capable professionals can resist learning when failure threatens their self-image. Other contributions explore productive cognitive difference, learning histories, the role of corporate research, and the management of professional intellect.
Read together, the essays show why knowledge management is not one department or tool. Organizational design, individual reasoning, social interaction, research, professional expertise, and institutional memory all affect whether experience becomes a shared capability.
The eight essays
- “The Coming of the New Organization” — Peter F. Drucker: how information changes hierarchy, coordination, and responsibility.
- “The Knowledge-Creating Company” — Ikujiro Nonaka: how tacit and explicit knowledge interact in organizational creation.
- “Building a Learning Organization” — David A. Garvin: practical disciplines for acquiring, interpreting, and transferring knowledge.
- “Teaching Smart People How to Learn” — Chris Argyris: the defensive reasoning that can block reflection and improvement.
- “Putting Your Company's Whole Brain to Work” — Dorothy Leonard and Susaan Straus: using different thinking styles as a source of creative abrasion.
- “How to Make Experience Your Company's Best Teacher” — Art Kleiner and George Roth: learning histories that preserve multiple perspectives on consequential work.
- “Research That Reinvents the Corporation” — John Seely Brown: research as a way to reshape organizational practice as well as products.
- “Managing Professional Intellect” — James Brian Quinn, Philip Anderson, and Sydney Finkelstein: developing and leveraging specialized expertise.
Why it matters for handovers
The anthology expands the definition of a handover. A transition record should convey information, but it should also help another person learn, question assumptions, access expertise, and understand how past experience shaped the present system.
For Flamekeeper, three themes are especially relevant: make tacit judgment discussable, preserve more than one perspective on important events, and invite reflection on failure without triggering defensive answers. Those principles improve the odds that a successor receives usable context rather than a polished but incomplete narrative.
Questions to carry into a handover
- Which part of the role depends on tacit judgment that examples or dialogue could make more visible?
- Where would a second perspective reveal assumptions or disagreement hidden by a single account?
- What failure or surprise produced learning that should shape the successor's decisions?
About the contributors
This is an edited anthology rather than a single-author book. Its contributors include foundational management thinkers such as Peter F. Drucker, Ikujiro Nonaka, Chris Argyris, John Seely Brown, Dorothy Leonard, and David A. Garvin, alongside researchers and practitioners of learning, innovation, and professional expertise. The catalog record and contents identify all eight essays and their authors.