The Metaknowledge Advantage
The Key to Success in the New Economy
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- 15,99 €
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- 15,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
In the tradition of the bestselling Intellectual Capital, internationally recognized management and quality expert Rafael Aguayo shows how integrated mastery of many areas of knowledge --
MetaKnowledge -- can give corporate managers an edge, no matter what the future has in store.
In today's world, the basis of economic power and wealth is rapidly shifting from physical resources to intellectual resources. Former powerhouses like U.S. Steel are now minor players, while modern giants such as Microsoft dominate industries that didn't even exist twenty-five years ago. The economy undergoes wild fluctuations. The Internet boom has come and gone. Through globalization, international boundaries are becoming less important every day. In such a dramatically changing environment, the management philosophy that endures must be based on principles that transcend daily occurrences and swings in the market.
That's where MetaKnowledge comes in. Rafael Aguayo brings years of firsthand consulting experience to this book and galvanizes it with an impressive yet accessible body of academic study. A disciple of W. Edwards Deming, Aguayo studied with the man who brought quality to the Japanese. He has since expanded his field of expertise to encompass many subjects that contribute to successful business strategies, no matter what the industry. In The MetaKnowledge Advantage, Aguayo gives American managers an advantage by helping them break out of their narrow fields of expertise, synthesizing areas of knowledge as diverse as ecology, psychology, statistics, chaos theory, self-actualization, and the theory of multiple intelligences. Drawing on the work of Walter Shewhart (the father of Statistical Quality Control), W. Edwards Deming, Carl Jung, James Lovelock, Bertrand Russell, and many other luminaries, The MetaKnowledge Advantage offers a comprehensive -- and extremely flexible -- strategy for good management and ethical behavior in any industry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The title may sound futuristic, but the advice couldn't be more old-fashioned. Promising a "foundation for management in the twenty-first century," Aguayo recycles everything from quality control to personality testing, with chaos theory, multiple intelligences and ethics thrown in for good measure. The plodding, didactic tone certainly doesn't add any freshness, despite the repetitive trumpeting of this allegedly new paradigm's transformative powers. (And with the insistence on the precise capitalization of "MetaKnowledge," one constantly expects to see trademark signs establishing the author's proprietary stake.) The rationale for MetaKnowledge and its components is often flimsy, as in the declaration that theories from life sciences are applicable because "business is a branch of life." Aguayo relies heavily upon the original developers of his various pet theories, adding little in the way of original thought beyond juxtaposing them. The sections dealing with quality control, for example, retrace the ideas of past masters Walter Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming, the subject of Aguayo's previous book and an obvious touchstone of his thinking. The pattern holds steady through the other chapters. Some assertions, like assigning Myers-Briggs personality types to people who never took the tests, are dubious at best, while other passages are stunningly obvious: proclaiming that "there is no dichotomy between good business and ethics," Aguayo names Nelson Mandela as "a model for all of us." Readers expecting a radical "metaphysics for management" will be disappointed in MetaKnowledge, an old bill of goods in not-so-shiny new packaging.
