IP law in China

Quick link 1: the IHT has an article on the development of intellectual property law in China. It’s presented as a profile of one the main Chinese judges in the field.

Thoughts on implementing social capital techniques in Asia

For some reason, I hadn’t known about Stowe Boyd’s Corante column until someone in my Bloglines feeds (I forget who) pointed to his piece on The Individual Is The New Group, which has got me thinking.

Now, I grant you: with me, he’s preaching to the converted. I spent years working in e-learning, and the most important – and difficult – part of that was always getting the students and tutors to digest the material and express their tthoughts and and understanding of it, to themselves, and also to the others. As a result, I spent a lot of time working with tools that helped individuals to share knowledge and understanding in ways that helped themselves and others. During my MBA, I took this into the field of Knowledge Management, and have tired to use it in a professional environment since. So, I’m absolutely on board with everything Stowe says in that piece.

But, and here’s the rub, I still got to the end and found myself a little… not sceptical, but thinking “well, so what?”. Again, I grant you that it’s only Part 1, so more is coming. The issue for me is that the tools definitely do permit knowledge workers to transcend the need for formal groups and to develop more effective ad-hoc, issue-oriented communities. Unfortunately, companies still like groups and tidy organisation charts – especially in Singapore and China, the Asian markets where I have experience. More than anything, the culture of ‘face’, respect for authority, and hierarchical thinking definitely works against the adoption of these working methods -even though they would benefit the company in the medium to long term.

So, I wonder – if we are in agreement that these tools are really useful, how can companies be induced to adopt them particularly in an Asian context? What organisational issues are thrown up by moving from formal groups to individual-based conversations? What about the legal issues that are often the first thing asked by managers – the leakage of IP, the possibility of remarks that might offend staff r customers? The PR aspects? What about the dangers that staff will use it to learn as much as they can before jumping ship – a big issue in China, where knowledge workers are amongst the most opportunistic, and staff turnover is a huge problem?

Kathy Sierra at Headrush addresses some of these questions; Doc Searls also evangalizes the new paradigm on his blog, and a new Watson Wyatt report seems to back up the economic benefits (though I’ve only read the summary). Still, I wonder how else to convince Asian companies that they should weaken their hierarchies..?

Knowledge Management – in Asia and elsewhere

Today I noticed an interesting article in Inside Knowledge magazine: Asian KM-driven organisations gain ground. It isn’t surprising to see who’s on the list: a mix of IT, consulting and pharma companies that would probably appear on a list drawn up by anyone half-familiar with KM in Asia. In fact, the list has been drawn up by the organisers of the ‘Most-Admired Knowledge Enterprise’ award. The interesting thing is that, according to them, Asian knowledge-driven organisations have now gained parity with their European and US counterparts. I’m not sure how to respond to this – does it mean that the industry in Asia is mature now, and there aren’t many more jobs to be had by aspirants such as myself? Surely not; the regional economy is still expanding, and my experience in China suggests that there’s still a lot of room for KM to become better-known here. How about Singapore? There seem to be a number of boutique companies there, and certainly there should be room for more operations within ASEAN. So, let’s hope that opportunities will arise. In fact, I’ve just submitted an application for one such position, based in Singapore, that came up on JobsDB.com. I think I fit the profile pretty well, so let’s wait and see.

The return of KM to mainstream status seems to be continuing: this weeks’ edition of the Economist has a series of articles under the heading A survery of the company, although only one, The new organisation is available online to non-subscribers. I bought a copy because the print copy referred to it as “Knowledge and the company” instead. The articles are interesting, though of course aimed at the general reader. It does reinforce the idea that KM is rising in importance as companies realise that intellectual property is becoming more and more vital and so needs to be managed more closely.

Not necessarily relevant to the rest of the post, but the KNOW Network have reprint of Jakob Nielsen’s guidelines for successful blogging, which I really should pay attention to.

Today’s links

Or rather yesterday’s, since it’s just passed midnight.

Anecdote on PKM

Jack Vinson on Uses for expert locators

Harvard Working Knowledge on Does your company belong in the blogsphere?

Singapore Entrepreneurs

Singapore: The Virtual Office

Singapore’s “Mr Miyagi” on Building a Business Blog

IBM on Enemies of innovation, and how not to become one

Tom Davenport on Personal Knowledge Management

George Siemens: Connectivism: Learning as Network-Creation

Links: social network analysis

I haven’t been bookmarking these well enough, so here are some recent links:

Introduction to social network methods

Wikipedia on Social networking

KM toolkit

Downloadable SNA report

SNA howto

Anecdote on designing a questionnaire (and in which my comment is gloriously slapped down – ouch!)

Business 2.0 on using SNA for job hunting

Destination CRM: is SNA a fad?

Sun Zi, home comforts

Shawn at Anecdote posted the other day on the topic of “Sun Tzu and Home comforts“. He’s making a common mistake, which is to assume that the Sun Zi Bing Fa (孙子-兵法) is fundamentally about war. One of my lecturers in Singapore was the same,saying that in business we don’t aim to kill the opposition, so why study Sun Zi? Even on the surface level this isn’t really the case – in business we often do attempt to ‘kill’ the opposition, by driving them out of business.

Even so, Sun Zi talks about generals and soldiers, emperors and sieges, chariots and arrows. Isn’t it obviously about war? Well, not really. In fact, it takes the principles of Daoism, and applies them to wrfare – but the same principles could be applied just as well to career development, puppy training, or more pertinently, to preparing a feast without a cookbook. What are the principles involved? Treating people appropriately but with repect; flexibility rather than dogmatism; delegation to the appropriate level of responsibility and, above all, being aware of events and conditions so that problems can be anticipated and forestalled. The principles are simple; it’s just understanding them instinctively that is difficult! New managers aren’t told to read Sun Zi in order to learn how to treat business as war; they’re told to read it in the hope that it will teach them to think independently, practically, and wisely. No bad thing, surely?

Update: Shawn replies:

Hi Emlyn, thanks for your alternative perspective. It has open my eyes to another side of Sun Tzu which I hadn’t appreciated.

I guess while I did think Art of War was about war, I have to say this wasn’t the main point of my post. My key message was that many businesses use the metaphor of war and I was suggesting other metaphors might be as useful if not better. The tumultuous household is one but it could also have been the organism, a complex system, or termites and how they build their mounds.

HR and social capital

Yesterday was the last session of my HRM course. We had to give a final group presentation, but my group split in two. With Nattee and Franklin, I gave a presentation on “Knowledge Management and HRM in China”. I found researching the topic to be very, very intereting, and it’s given me a lot of ideas. We had to cover a lot of ground in 20 minutes, so I’m not sure yet what people made of it, but I know the professor made a lot of notes. Now we have to write the report, due next week…

Social networking tools, FOAF, etc

Out of the blue, I got an email from a stranger today. He was doing research on KM in China, and asked me a number of questions about how Chinese companies (as opposed to foreign companies in China, was the implicit distinction, I think) are using KM, collective intelligence, organisational structure and cooperation. Very, very interesting questions. Here’s the basis of my gut feeling about this:

Chinese society is traditionally very much based on personal trust relationships, given that society used to be based on Confucian principles. Imperial authority was based on Confucianism, and the principle that ‘virtue’ should come from an internal sense of duty, rather than being imposed by any external authority.

Practically, this meant that society had only criminal law, not civil law – so, in the absence of recourse to the courts (over contract disputes, for example), people dealt only with people they knew and trusted personally, or with whom they had a common connection. Even after the upheavals of the past 100 years, these traits are still strong. There is a definite generation gap now: you’ll hear that people currently in their mid-twenties or younger may have quite different attitudes from those older than mid-twenties. I think this is true, though perhaps only for those people who have grown up in the eastern seaboard. Overall, though, the culture of personal relationships is very strong today.

I suspect that this will make FOAF, social networking tools such as LinkedIn incredibly powerful in China – when they become available in Chinese. Gmail went through a phase of being very, very popular in China,and I believe that this was due to its invitation-only model.

In HR terms, industry in China is dominated by a bubble mentality: there’s so much demand for skilled workers that job-hopping is the norm. Once things start to settle down, though, and people start to take a longer term career view, I think that KM and social networks are going to be more useful and widespread here than in the West.