Creativity and Perception in Management: Development
Finally getting back to a few summaries here and I am way back. This is still book 1, and I will try to be brief to catch up. This post is about how our ways of doing things was and is shaped by our history.
Linear Thinking
We in the West, tend to favor linear analysis, thinking in hierarchies, top to bottom. Most of our management thinking is taking it one step at a time, in different stages. Think about how your life progresses, team building, innovation, … . In the east a cycle plays a much larger role, partly due to the hindu cyclical nature. You could describe knowledge creation as a cycle:
… Shared problem solving Implementating and integrating Experimenting Importing Knowledge Shared …
Balance is something that is more important in china, who are more at ease with interdependencies and opposites. Relationship is more about the context, and only now starting to gain importance.
Approaches to Learning
Organizational learning is big business. Investors in People (IIP) would be an example. Organizations have to enable their employees to learn and there are some patterns/items that are important here:
\- Information
\- Competencies
\- Reflection
\- Unlearning
\- Modelling the best (rather than just removing problems)
Local Knowledge
Western thinking is often breaking problems down and thinking deeply about the little bit of details, not taking into account the whol picture. We often simplify things too much in the process. Westerners tend to over emphasize standards, implementing technology to analyse it, than to take into account local knowledge that might not be able to be put into such a rigid system and would only get lost.