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Knowledge Management Models 61

They stress that knowledge-creating activities take place between people and within
each human being, and that we have to consider knowledge to be among the most
important corporate assets.
Since there are many overlapping categories of types of knowledge, it is tempting
to look for the defi nitive method of knowledge management. While we study many
methods, there is no need to choose one method over another for all of the many
different types of content. Respecting the diversity of types of knowledge, content
management may be a better, more general term than knowledge management.
Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) provide a more philosophical distinction: starting
from the traditional defi nition of knowledge as “ justifi ed true belief. ” They defi ne
knowledge as “ a dynamic human process of justifying personal belief toward the truth ”
(Nonaka and Takeuchi, 58, emphasis added). They contend that it is necessary to
create knowledge in order to produce innovation. For them, organizational knowledge
creation is: “ The capability of a company as a whole to create new knowledge, dis-
seminate it throughout the organization and embody it in products, services, and
systems (p. 58). ”
The concept of tacit knowledge, as we saw in chapter 1, has been clarifi ed by Polanyi
(1966) who stresses the importance of the “ personal ” mode of knowledge construc-
tion, affected by emotions and acquired at the end of a process of every individual ’ s
active creation and organization of the experiences. When a person tacitly knows, he
or she does and acts without distance, uses the body, and has great diffi culty explain-
ing in words the rules and algorithms the process he or she is involved in. The act of
tacitly knowing is without distance from things and performances and the knowing
interaction between persons is one of an unaware observation and a social, commu-
nitarian closeness.
A thesis of Polanyi is that all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is hard to express in formalized ways, is context-specifi c, personal,
and diffi cult to communicate. On the other hand, explicit knowledge is codifi ed,
expressed in formal and linguistic ways, easily transmittable and storable, and express-
ible in words and algorithms; however, explicit knowledge represents only the tip of
the iceberg of the entire body of knowledge. This defi nition of the tacit/explicit
concepts makes clear the importance of adequately considering the tacit dimension.
The 80/20 rule appears to apply here — roughly 80 percent of our knowledge is in
tacit form as individuals, as groups, and as an organization. Only 15 – 20 percent of
valuable knowledge has typically been captured, codifi ed, or rendered tangible and
concrete in some fashion. This is usually in the form of books, databases, audio or
video recordings, graphs or other images, and so forth. The tacit/explicit mobilization