The Knowledge-Creating Company

The centerpiece of the Japanese approach is the recognition that creating new knowledge is not simply a matter of “processing” objective information. Rather, it depends on tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches of individual employees and making those insights available for testing and use by the company as a whole. The key to this process is personal commitment, the employees’ sense of identity with the enterprise and its mission. Mobilizing that commitment and embodying tacit knowledge in actual technologies and products require managers who are as comfortable with images and symbols—slogans such as Theory of Automobile Evolution, analogies like that between a personal copier and a beer can, metaphors such as optoelectronics—as they are with hard numbers measuring market share, productivity, or ROI.