Knowledge Management Studies

"In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital." Leadership expert Warren Bennis implies in his famous quote that in business, change is something that can be initiated and driven to completion. Much along these lines, change in business is usually divided up into two theories: planned approaches and emergent approaches. Planning Change If change is something that we can plan and drive to completion, then it would reason that a process model could be put in place for change management. There are several theories about which steps are part of the change process and how many steps to include in the process. While this approach might seem logical and well structured enabling us to measure steps along the way to completion, it doesn't seem to fit change. Ultimately it assumes that "organizations act under constant conditions that can be taken into consideration and planned for."(Barnard, M. & Stoll, N., 2010) This is simply not the case. Change ...

"The consultant's primary purpose is to enable the client to figure out and make sense of what is really worrying her." (Shein, 2016) When we look at how it is that we determine the client's needs, this sense of help that is delivered by Shein must be always considered. Engaging the client as a partner or a sounding board is the best approach to determine need. Jumping right into an assessment or prescribing the solution before we actually get to the problem at hand is not only like a doctor/patient relationship as is stated in the slides for this week, but I would argue that it is more like a veterinarian/animal relationship. The vet must get to the root of the concern with out much help from the animal. The animal can not tell the vet what is wrong, so they make an educated guess based on narrative from the owner, reactions of the animal, and test results. The diagnosis may be correct or may be totally wrong, but it is the vet's job to make their best educated...

This week was a challenge to say the least! I have written many gap analyses and risk analyses in my life for work, but I have never done one introspectively. It was difficult to not focus on a "thing", such as a facility or a project. I found myself starting over several times so that I could re-focus on just my credibility and not other aspects that might be found in my consulting business (and even now I think I still overlapped a bit). My complete gap analysis can be found here:  Full Gap Analysis I am going to focus this writing on the areas that I found I would have the most work to be done to improve my credibility. The first area that I will focus on is that of passion. I segmented passion into three categories: passion for the organization passion for tasks passion to drive toward betterment As Jim Whitehurst reminds us, "people are drawn and generally want to follow passionate people." (2015) I pride myself in the amount of passion that I have t...