Location: Washington, D.C.

Dates: To Be Determined

Instructors: Joseph M. Firestone, Ph.D. and Mark W. McElroy

Price: $695

 

Overview

 

Organizations are born free, but everywhere they are in chains – chains forged from constraints on who within them is authorized to detect and recognize problems, propose solutions, and criticize, test and evaluate ideas once they have been proposed. Mostly, as organizations develop, they increasingly confine problem detection, solution formulation, and the critical process of testing and evaluating new ideas to a small decision making elite. This results in mistakes in recognizing some problems and outright failures to recognize others. It results in the emergence of fewer and lower quality solutions. And, finally, it results in solutions that produce unintended consequences that may threaten the very existence of the organizations whose adaptive processes are constrained.

 

Thus, Enron adopts a solution to the problem of maximizing its market value that, after initial success, in the end destroys nearly all of its market value. And it does so, in great part, because it hides critical details of its market strategy from employees and Board Members alike, and concentrates knowledge of it within a very small band of insiders. Similar stories apply to Worldcom, Tyco, Global Crossing, and many, many others. For these companies, steering the course of adaptation was relegated to the hands of a few in relatively closed conditions. Learning and the adoption of new knowledge was restricted to small groups within top management. Stockholders and other parties were excluded, even though their vested interest in the quality of knowledge produced and integrated into practice in these firms was enormous.  Knowledge Processing in such firms is carried out by innovation oligarchies, whose tight fisted control over the power to produce and adopt ideas is only exceeded by their authority to compel their subordinates to carry them out.  This is a recipe for letting our worst ideas live until they kill the organizations that originate.

 

The reality is that successful, and sustainable, adaptation is driven by distributed Knowledge Processing, characterized by individuals whose self-organizing patterns create organizational knowledge in an atmosphere of openness in problem recognition, solution formulation, and solution evaluation. The type of organization that is characterized by such agents operating in such an atmosphere, whether private or public, is called  The Open Enterprise. An Open Enterprise can sustain innovation, maintain integrity, and reduce errors and risk. In this workshop you will learn about this normative model for organizations, its propensity to produce these key benefits, and the practical, incremental, strategy that can get you to it, producing benefits at every step along the way.

 

 

Instructors

 

This workshop will be team-taught by Joseph M. Firestone, Ph.D. Managing Director and CEO of KMCI, and Mark W. McElroy, Founder and Director of the Center for Sustainable Innovation.

Joseph M. Firestone, Ph.D. is a consultant, trainer, researcher, and widely published author in the fields of Organizational Transformation, Knowledge, Innovation, and Risk Reduction and Management. His experience spans university (graduate and undergraduate) teaching, private and public sector research and consulting, and software and hardware systems integration. His clients have included such organizations as the US Department of State, Air Force, Navy, Department of Commerce, Department of Justice, Census Bureau, Department of Agriculture, Blue Cross Blue Shield, GE Power Systems, US West, and Kraft/General Foods. He has taught at such universities as Michigan State University, State University of new York at Buffalo, State University of New York at Binghamton, and University of Hawaii. And he has performed research at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Brandeis University's Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, General Research Corporation, the Center for Management and Policy Research, Inc., and the KMCI Research Center. At present, Dr. Firestone is Managing Director and CEO of KMCI, and Executive Vice President, CKO of Executive Information Systems, Inc.

Mark W. McElroy is a thought leader, consultant, and award-winning author in the fields of Knowledge and Sustainability Management, Sustainable Innovation, and Transparency Management. He has related expertise in organizational learning, innovation management, corporate governance, and 'open' operating models for business.  He is a twenty-six year veteran of management consulting, including time spent at Price Waterhouse and KPMG Peat Marwick, where he served as U.S. National Partner-In-Charge of KPMG’s Enterprise Networks practice.  Mr. McElroy was also a Principal in IBM’s KM practice in Cambridge, MA.  At present, Mr. McElroy is Director of the new Center for Sustainable Innovation, LLC, as well as President and CEO of Macroinnovation Associates, LLC, a management consultancy, both based in Windsor, Vermont. 
 

Joe and Mark are co-developers of The New Knowledge Management, K-STREAM™ Methodology, the Open Enterprise normative model for Knowledge Management, and the KMCI CKIM Certificate Workshop. Joe and Mark are also co-authors, or co-editors of  Key Issues in the New Knowledge Management, Excerpt # One from The Open Enterprise: Building Business Architectures for Openness and Sustainable Innovation, a special issue of The Learning Organization Journal entitled "Has KM Been Done? and other articles and papers.

In addition, Joe is the developer of the Enterprise Knowledge Portal model and the author of Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge Management and Reducing Risk by Killing Your Worst Ideas, He is also the developer of the KM blog "All Life Is Problem Solving" (http://radio.weblogs.com/0135950), and the popular KM web site at www.dkms.com. Mark is the principal developer of the patent-pending Policy Synchronization Method (PSM) for enabling sustainable innovation, author of The New Knowledge Management and the founder and President of Macroinnovation Associates, LLC. He is also developer of its well-known web site at: www.macroinnovation.com.

See The Open Enterprise Syllabus

Register for The Open Enterprise