KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND DIALECTICS

values, ideals, and mental models are shared. As the forces of global
change are moving Japanese companies more and more into the
ethnically and culturally diverse environment, they need to break away
from their “group think” experience and gain new insights on managing
diversity.
In addition, Japanese companies face the danger of being left behind the
pace of change that is taking place in the Information Revolution. In this
day and age of the Internet, the quantity and quality of explicit
knowledge that can be accumulated have \ expanded exponentially and
the conversion of explicit knowledge into explicit knowledge
(combination) can now be carried out almost effortlessly with a few
strokes of a keyboard. The Internet has also made English the global
standard. Gone are the days when the Japanese were sending memos to
each other in handwritten Japanese via facsimile machines. Japanese
companies need to make better use of advanced information technology,
software capabilities, and computerized management systems to
accumulate, store, and disseminate explicit knowledge throughout the
organization.
The future belongs to companies that can synthesize the best of the East
(A) and the West (B) and construct a universal model (C) of
organizational knowledge creation. We contend that this synthesis is
already taking place, both in the East and the West. In the next section,
we will look at two companies - IBM and Canon - that have succeeded
in incorporating the “best of two worlds” approach to knowledge
creation.
HIROTAKA TAKEUCHI AND IKUJIRO NONAKA: KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND
DIALECTICS (0507; p. 25 )