The Geography of Thought, Straits Knowledge Articles and Guides, KM Issues and Practices

22-Nov-06 Archive of Weekly KM Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Books

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why by Richard E. Nisbett

Table of Contents

1. The Syllogism and the Tao: Philosophy, Science, and Society in Ancient Greece and China 1
2. The Social Origins of Mind: Economics, Social Practices, and Thought 29
3. Living Together vs. Going It Alone: Social Life and Sense of Self in the Modern East and West 47
4. “Eyes in Back of Your Head” or “Keep Your Eye on the Ball”: Envisioning the World 79
5. “The Bad Seed” or “The Other Boys Made Him Do It”: Causal Attribution and Causal Modeling East and West 111
6. Is the World Made Up of Nouns or Verbs?: Categories and Rules vs. Relationships and Similarities 137
7. “Ce N’est Pas Logique” or “You’ve Got a Point There”: Logic and the Law of Noncontradiction vs. Dialectics and the Middle Way 165
8. And If the Nature of Thought Is Not Everywhere the Same: Implications for Psychology, Philosophy, Education, and Everyday Life 191

• Epilogue: The End of Psychology or the Clash of Mentalities: The Longevity of Differences 219

Review by Allan Engelhardt:

“Read this book. It is a remarkable work. Richard E. Nisbett is a professor at the University of Michigan who works on cultural psychology. Through careful experiments and analysis he has shown that different cultures think differently and when we observe the world we see differently. This is surprising and important.

It is surprising because we are all humans who use the same gray matter to think and rationalize, and it is important as the world becomes more global and the solutions to our important issues increasingly require global coordination and collaboration. How can you collaborate with someone who has a fundamentally different cognition? These are important questions for anybody in business or politics today.”

KM Links

Straits Knowledge Articles Published in 2006

• Money, Testosterone and Knowledge Management
• Why KM Is Hard To Do: Infrastructure, KM and Implementing Change
• Conflict, Gender and Identity in Online Communities
• Practical Techniques for Complex Knowledge Transfer
• KM Competencies: Is Certification The Way To Go?

Straits Knowledge How-to Guides Published in 2006

• Information and Records Management Policy Development Guidelines
• KM Sustainability Framework
• Knowledge Champion Guidelines

KM Questions

Q: What are some of the perennial KM issues business firms are dealing with?

A (from Denham Grey):

1. How to speed learning, increase awareness and share experiences.
2. Helping groups learn from mistakes and errors, practices to carry over learnings from project to project and improve corporate memory.
3. Discovering opportunities and gaps in knowledge flows, improving personal networking and finding experts (in larger firms).
4. Providing environments, tools and processes that encourage informal learning, knowledge sharing of effective practices and stimulate innovation.
5. Improving competitive advantage, agility and adaption by making staff more aware, sharing the small insights, building on incremental improvements.
6. Finding tacit knowledge sources and helping to put these to work.

Q: Which KM practices are the most important?

A (from Denham Grey):

1. Facilitate conversations
2. Enable connections
3. Support knowledge sharing
4. Provide mentors
5. Clarify meaning