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Antibodies: Individual Stars Can Destroy Culture

N2Growth Blog

Tech companies pay dearly for engineering talent; universities get into bidding wars for gifted professors, and NBA and other professional sports teams shell out hundreds of millions of dollars for star players. Hardy shares an interesting, somewhat counterintuitive observation in today’s world.

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Are You Wasting Money On Useless Knowledge Management?

Harvard Business Review

The first measures the degree to which knowledge is tacit and uncodified, versus explicit and codified. Highly tacit knowledge embodies deep, almost intuitive understanding that is hard to articulate and explain to others and that is rooted in concrete experience. To codifying tacit knowledge?

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What Tesla Knows That Other Patent-Holders Don’t

Harvard Business Review

There’s a lot of thinking in the research these days on the gap between the codified knowledge that is patentable and gets disclosed versus tacit knowledge that really exists in how you actually produce,” says Orly Lobel, a law professor at the University of San Diego specializing in intellectual property.

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How to Successfully Work Across Countries, Languages, and Cultures

Harvard Business Review

An Indonesian engineer found commonality with Rakuten’s requirement that employees spend five minutes per week cleaning their desks by comparing it to his practice of washing his feet and hands when entering a mosque. Interactions are also vital for sharing knowledge across sites.

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Case Study: Will Our Chinese Partner Copy Our Technology?

Harvard Business Review

The only person not applauding was Wang Xiguo, the engineer who had led the development of Prime's power train technology. Granted, we don't have a long history in cars like Nissan does, but our power electronics engineering is every bit as good. I don't think they'd be capable of reverse engineering every one of the components.". "I

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Algorithms Make Better Predictions — Except When They Don’t

Harvard Business Review

Further, algorithms cannot (yet, anyway) tap intuition — the soft factors that are not data inputs, the tacit knowledge that experienced managers deploy every day, nor the creative genius of innovators. Perhaps the prediction and explanation of an engineer who is proud to have improved a piece of the variable in question. “We

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Getting Smarter about Google's "Brain Drain"

Harvard Business Review

Just yesterday, on the front page of the New York Times , came a report about how "low-level engineers, product managers and prominent managers" from the executive ranks are leaving the company for high-profile companies such as Facebook as well as venture-funded startups of the sort that dot the technology landscape.