 Everyone, could you kindly take your seats? I know it's late, guys. I know you're tired. It's been a really long day already. But please, take your seats, and we will have another interesting presentation the last for the day, before we set off with a little introduction to the group project. So... Make sure I'm a sir. I think there's one more presentation after this. Yes, there is one more presentation. I think there's two presentations. Oh, my God. You're really lucky. Okay, perhaps... Okay. Thank you for coming back. And let's get on with the next presentation from our guest lecturer, Ashok. Thank you, Ashok. Sorry. No problem. I'm just going to see if this works. Can you hear me at the back? Yes. You can hear me? Brilliant. Okay, I'm Ashok Jasapara from the University of London. I think I don't want to give you too much. I've been sitting through all the presentations you've had a lot. I mean, a lot to take on. The main thing I want to get you to do, and I feel over the next few days it would be wonderful if you have, is really questioning everything we presenters tell you. Don't take it as gospel because I've heard some things already. I've thought, what a load of nonsense from some of the presenters. So I've just thought, you've got to do exactly the same, okay? Don't think that we know it all because we don't. And we question each other. That's why, as an academic, I love it because I can question everyone in the world and it doesn't really matter. And I can write about it. I don't have to make a living by selling to other companies or whatever. I make a living out of trying to find what I believe the truth is. For Andrea's talk last, I want to say I am one of those nuclearized people. My former career was really as a bridge designer. And I used to teach architects and engineers when I came into academia. And I used to tell them, particularly at master's level, I'd say, and this is going back to the whole notion of tacit knowledge, was I'd say, put your hands up if you know about these two words. Flexibility and stiffness. And most people would put their hands up and say, yeah, yeah, we know that. I'd say, oh, you know 10 times more than I do about structural engineering. And they'd say, why? I'd say, well, when I got my professional, passed my professional exams, the person who taught me everything, he said, all of structural engineering is about these two words, flexibility and stiffness. And the more and more I got into teaching it, looking at drawings, I could see exactly what he meant. So before I did any calculations, I knew whether a structure was correct or not. So that's useful. So telling you a little bit about me, I'm glad to say, I've got a book on knowledge management. My publishers, Prentice Hall or Pearson, they say it is the leading, the most sold knowledge management text in the whole world. It's also been translated into four languages, most recently into Chinese. So if you want to look at the debate, not what the speakers are telling you, because you can look into this book and it'll show you alternative perspectives. So bear that in mind. So if any of you want to borrow this through the week, please do. Bring it back in the day. Maybe put it in the corner so that others can borrow it as well. Yep, if you'd like to do that. What did I want to say? Okay. So in this lecture, I'm going to keep it short. You've had already tons thrown at you. I'm going to question one of Ron's things. He said about one of his last slides, was it's really important to create a strategic asset management plan? I wonder if you can help me. Do you think that's a good idea? Oh, you came. Okay, that's like you, sir. Young man over here. Yes, you tell me. Do you think that's a good idea? I think it's a good idea. Why? Why? I'm sure that my contribution is recognized. So some form of document saying that oh, I've got... What are the steps that you have to take or reactions that you have to take? Okay. Can I ask a lady over there? Can you help me out? Yes. Could you just sort of help me just by saying, why do you think it may be a terrible thing to do? Why do you think it could be a terrible thing? And part of my lecture today is going to tell you why it's a terrible thing to do. Okay, you help us. Thank you. Okay. Okay, yeah. That's fantastic because in a way, that's what I'm trying to get at within this very short talk is really saying that if you go, all of you, let's say you all decide to do an MBA, if you do strategic management, what will they teach you? It'll be 90% of the time. We'll look at all the strategic planning processes. But when you go to organizations and you say, oh, can I have a look at your strategic document from last year from the senior management team? They'll say, oh, yeah, yeah. Look, we've got a big document, all the senior directors, they've all signed it. So then you say, oh, how much of it was actually realized? How much of all this stuff did you actually do? And they'll say, oh, well, 20%, 10%, not much often. So often people can get into this whole notion of strategies of feeling, oh, fantastic, because they have a nice document. But often when you go to organizations, very little of it is realized. So I'd just say, bear that in mind, because most MBA or strategic strategy texts will tell you all about the fantastic planning processes, scenarios, planning, SWOT analysis, critical success factors and so on, but not necessarily how to realize those strategies, the implementation which I heard will be hearing more about through this course. So, oh, this is an old one of mine. Sorry, I'll have to, I had put another one together because I realized it's got too many slides so you'll see me going through it. So what is the strategy I was going to ask you? Is it a plan, pattern, consistency, position, perspective and so on? So it's just different people when you say, we have a strategy. What are you talking about? Is it a perspective? Also one of the other things that's come up today that just got me going was number of speakers talked about culture. Culture is always a big thing, oh, culture. But for me, the hardest thing to do in any organization is to change a culture. You talk to any organization and you say, oh, if they say, oh, we're going through cultural change, it means it'll be a minimum of five years, five years before they'll be able to achieve anything because the surface level norms you can shift, but the deeper values, the deeper assumptions, much, much harder to do anything about. So be careful when we talk about culture, remember that maybe a lot of the speakers are talking about the context in terms of what we're doing. Hang on. I'll forget. Sorry, it was a wrong presentation. Yes, so this is really what I was trying to say, that there's a lot of organizations and very large multinational organizations who go into strategy as a plan. So we were hearing from Andrea in the last talk of saying, oh, some of the objectives of nuclear knowledge management is about operational issues, organizational performance, innovation, safety standards, and so on. They may be our objectives, and then the strategies are what help us achieve those objectives. So either the most common way of looking at strategies is some form of plan, and because people have a nice document, they get really secure a feeling, oh, yes, we've got a nice plan. So they have a deliberate strategy and intended strategy, but more common than not, a lot of it goes unrealized. However, there's another gang, and we'll look at some of the different schools of thought, because where I'm getting to with all this is really trying to bring you on board with what people call the knowledge-based view. Ron talked about knowledge-driven firms where those firms, organizations, see knowledge as a critical asset of saying how do we get to that knowledge-based view, and also what are some of the disadvantages of it? Just because we all happen to be a nuclear knowledge management conference doesn't mean it's all lovely and wonderful. There are disadvantages of it as well. So, just very... I'm not going to go through these slides, you'll have them on your thing, but I'm just going through some of the schools of thought to do with strategy, and one of them, the design school, says, okay, if you're any organization, you do a SWOT analysis. Look at your... internally, your strengths and weaknesses, look externally at your opportunities and threats. So that's one school that you'll do I'm going to see if I can somehow really whiz through some of these slides because I want to get on to the really interesting stuff without wasting too much time. Let's move to some of the interesting stuff. Oh, this is slightly interesting. You may have come across this notion. This is a Hungarian military unit caught in a sandstorm, returned three days, and they explained, so this is all about strategies and road maps and so on. Yes, they said, we considered ourselves lost and waited for the end, and one of us found a map in his pocket that calmed us down. We pitch camped, lasted out the snowstorms, and through the map we discovered our bearings. And here we are, the lieutenant who dispatched the unit, borrowed the remarkable map, and had a good look at it. He discovered to his astonishment it was not a map of the Alps, but a map of the Pyrenees. And this is a true story, so saying, look, you can have the right map and get there, or the right plan, but it doesn't necessarily mean you'll get there. What I want to do is just get to my lovely... Oh yes, this is what I really want to get to. Okay, so what I'm trying to get to is if you do a traditional MBA program, what they'll teach you in terms of strategy is should you go for generic strategies, cost leadership, differentiation, porters, five forces, pestle, scenario planning, this, that and the other. So in terms of the thinking bit and doing the planning, they're utterly brilliant. And you can't fault all the tools they use, BCG matrices, this, that and the other. However, when you look at the implementation part of any strategy text, you'll find it's tiny. And you think, hang on, you talk to any manager or director, that is the hardest, hardest thing to do is the implementation side. However, there's also the learning gang, the institutionalist perspective. I'd say their thinking bit and their understanding, it's all a bit fuzzy and it's all about learning and it's all about understanding. It's about your competencies. Tomorrow I'll talk to you about dynamic capabilities, absorptive capacities, this, that and the other. But you say, I want to get a handle on this and they'll be really fuzzy with it. However, they will say in terms of doing, it is about learning, it's about strategic intent, core competencies. You have to understand the politics of the organization to get senior leaders on board, et cetera. So it's remembering that we've got two gangs and particularly if we're thinking of knowledge, knowledge at the end of the day, it's really the outputs from the learning processes. So if you think of learning, outputs are the knowledge processes. So learning is important in terms of this doing perspective and tomorrow morning I'll go through everything at the moment that we know in the KM sphere around learning, whether it's at individual groups or organizational level so that you really have a good sense of that. Also, can you put your hands up? Have any of you used overlapping processes? Put your hands up if you have. I'm saying this because you might find it really useful for your projects and it's looking at strategies because I've done it with directors of large multinational companies and so on. It's a common tool that's used by consultants in terms of strategy planning processes. And what you do is, if we can get hold of post-its, you get your team or group together, in this case I would get directors together in a firm and I would say, okay, I want you to decide what are your aims for this coming year? What are your aims or your objectives? And they would give me post-its, they're posh post-its because they're done on a nice oval sort of thing. And I'd say just one word on each one, right as many, and we're going to put them up on this blackboard. And then what I would do, facilitating it, is purely develop clusters of their aims and objectives. So let's say I've got three or four clusters here and then I'd say I'd stop them after half an hour and I'd say I think we seem to be duplicating what you're saying here. And at that point I'd say, right, I want you to prioritize out of these four, which are the top four? Okay, and then we're going to look at that particular one and now I want you to use your post-its to tell me what strategy or strategies is going to help us reach that aim that you've prioritized for me, okay? And then do a similar process, but then from, so it's aims and objectives, then I'll go down to strategies and then I'll go down to actions, okay? And remember, none of this is coming out of a fantastic textbook or a report or anything. It's a group of highly intelligent individuals working it out for themselves, okay? So you may find this process useful. What I want to do now is just move quickly onto the resource-based view. Let me just shift some slides. Okay, so really there was Barney and others who came up with the notion to make you competitive isn't about having these amazing plans anymore. What it's about is the resources in your organization. And what they said, particularly not in the public sector, but in the private sector, to be competitive. I'm still back, sorry about that. I think, is that okay? Okay, fantastic. So what they said was the resources to be competitive, whatever they are in your organization, need to be valuable. They need to be rare. They need to be inimitable and not easily replicate. I'll shuffle it down. It's okay. Thank you. You're very kind. Okay, so this is really people coming up with saying, ah, it's not the plans. It's the resources that are most important within the organization. And you can see that from the resources, what we really get is a move to saying no. It's the critical resource you have in an organization is knowledge. And so almost from the resource-based view of the firm, you've got the knowledge-based view of the firm. But it was really saying this is where it comes from. And what the resources they were saying at the time was top management skills, the culture, the information systems, the human resource management systems. Also, to give you a sense, we've had a bit of this from the previous speakers about where am I coming from in terms of knowledge management. And it's really saying that for me, the three big pillars, one is the strategy. Tomorrow I'll talk to you about the organizational learning, the processes, the routines in organizations. So that's the second pillar. And then the third pillar is very much the tools, the technologies. We've also heard about Web 2 technologies, machine learning, data analytics, and so on, of saying that I know, especially in Britain, you can get a huge division even amongst academics. You've got the gang at Warwick who are very strongly into the people dimension. You get people at Loughborough very strongly into the technological dimensions and so on. But where I'm coming from, it's really about integrating the three of those. It's really saying that you've got to remember that that's why I say the only thing I want you to take away from my talk isn't any of the content. It's to question everything. So you'll find that all my slides, if you go back online, I've put down criticisms of everything. Because you have to look at things critically. And that's part of, I think, personally being a good knowledge manager or knowledge official. So some of the criticisms about the resource-based view is how do you know which resources contribute to that so-called value that you're looking for, the competitive advantage, if it's a dynamically changing environment? How do you gain these resources if you haven't got them, if you're in different generations of nuclear building and capacity building especially? And how can firms compete if they deny the importance of those market conditions, which is what the planners tend to focus on, in a way? So the knowledge-based view was really pushing this whole notion that, look, it's about knowledge, the key competitive force. It's about both the technological information system side, as well as things like communities of practice that we've heard about today. Knowledge sharing is important and the primary task is to integrate that knowledge between people, product and services. Okay, I won't do this. I'll escape from that. Okay, and then I think my last slide, almost I'd like to show you, is really saying that what's happened is that, also within my book, I've put in 10 case studies of different organizations, public and private, throughout the world, and they have developed very different knowledge management strategies. Some have pushed almost the technological side of their knowledge management strategies. So people like Royal Dutch Shell, they go in for what's called codification strategies, where they say we're much more interested in the technology, we're looking at the explicit knowledge. We want to develop wikis for everything that we do. So because 70% of their workforce is away from home at any given time, we want everything on wiki so that everyone can get access to this. However, you'll also see, and I'm praying that for my session tomorrow on the World Bank, which I'm going to hope is highly interactive, that you'll have read it, but you'll also see that they go in much more for a personalization strategy. It's very much people-led. It's around how do we support that tacit knowledge development within an organization. Okay, and then just, I suppose one last one, is really saying that I was really arguing here of saying exploring if organizations are into things like we've heard about productivity today, efficiency today, slow market conditions, is it likely to be more of a codification strategy where basically they're doing much the same thing that they've done for a long, long time? Or are there rapid market changes where people have got to innovate and if they don't innovate, they're likely to die? So in which case, they may choose more of a personalization strategy rather than a codification strategy. Okay, have I gone over my time or am I okay? Fantastic, thank you. Brilliant. Some questions from the floor. Yes, please. Okay, documenting it or not, yeah? If I did it to the commentator, if I missed the documentation, so I don't know the previous, did what? All I was doing was sort of being provocative by saying that most organizations will have some form of plan, they'll have some form of strategy, some form of document of saying this is what we're trying to do. All I was saying is that some organizations treat it like the Bible or Koran or whatever of just saying that is it, yeah? And they forget about the implementation of it, yeah? So you'll find that a senior management team, what they'll do is they'll spend two or three months almost justifying their existence by creating some huge document and then feeling happy of saying, oh, let's pass it lower down into the organization and everyone's got to implement this, yeah? From my experience, what I've noticed is that the ones who are developing strategies are not the ones to implement. That's right. So there is a big gap, you know, even actually you guys today, the ones who are presenting, you're not really implementing, you know what I mean? You're teaching, you're putting the basis for it, you're doing research, but the implementation that doers a different group of people and there is a big disconnect there. That's right. And that's why I say that implementation is much harder and when you're implementing it, first thing you need to get is senior management support because if you haven't got it and you're at a lower level, it's very, very hard to implement anything and at senior management level, if you haven't got almost some form of involvement with different employees, it's very difficult to implement it because if you're just shouting at people, you've got to do this, you've got to do this, people who are knowledge workers are not likely to listen to you. They're likely to sort of say, no, I'm not going to do that. Thank you very much. Yeah. In which case, what I was trying to say at the beginning of the talk is that the strategy or the plan remains unrealized rather than realized. Yeah. Okay. Which is sad. Thank you. I like what you want us to be critical. Of course, yeah. And I really like that you said it. But then, how can you be a good critic? Why do you draw the line between being critical and being a nuisance? Yeah. That's a really good question because being too critical can be very destructive as well because I've seen people in my own organization at different universities and so on where no matter what you say, they've got the brains to basically critique anything. Yeah. But you just have to say, right, we need as a group of people to come together and develop a consensus. Yeah. This is where the whole issue of dialogue and discussion that we'll explore tomorrow in my talk will come in. Yeah. Of really saying that we've got a job to be done. And so, for example, as a leader, you may open a major course of action for implementation for, let's say, three months where you've got talking to lots of people. And then you say to people, look, we've spoken about this for three months. I've heard all your views. Now it's time for action. Yeah. And at that point, it's just saying we need to move on. Fantastic. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you so much. Okay. We're going to go through this a little bit faster than I normally would because of time. But I'm going to try to find out the most interesting parts of this that I think that you all will be able to take away.