The eleventh issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

Volume 9, Number 11 contains:

• Sustainability and Economic Theory: An Organism in Premise by Abdallah M. Hasna.
• A Study of the Impact of University Values and Culture on Staff and Student Attitudes by Aspa Sarris.
• Reconfiguring IT and the Cultural Dimension in Knowledge Management Practices by Fahmi Ibrahim and Stephen Barr.
• Student Management in Chinese Higher Education Institutions by Xiaoli Jiang, Xiaoping Ma and Yumei Wu.
• Integrating Knowledge Management and Lean Thinking to Achieve Six Sigma Performance by Rania A.M. Shamah.
• A Review on Determining Key Capability Indicators in Individuals and Proposals on Applied Capability Evaluation by Mona Shekarriz and Alireza Mousavi.
• Systems Thinking and Fratricide: Operationalizing Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning by Anthony J Masys.
• The Management of Change in Information Technology: Approaches of Academic Library Directors in the United States by Zhixian Yi.

There have been hedgehogs; there have been foxes; and then there was Paul Samuelson.

I’m referring, of course, to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction among thinkers – foxes who know many things, and hedgehogs who know one big thing. What distinguished Paul Samuelson as an economic thinker, making him like nobody else, past or present, was the fact that he knew – and taught us – many big things. No economist has ever had so many seminal ideas.

With a little help from Google Scholar, I’ve compiled a list of some of Samuelson’s big ideas. I say “some” because I’m sure it’s not complete. But anyway, here are eight – eight! – seminal insights, each of which gave rise to a vast and continuing research literature:

1. Revealed preference: There was a revolution in consumer theory in the 1930s, as economists realised that there was much more to consumer choice than diminishing marginal utility. But it was Samuelson who taught us how much can be inferred from the simple proposition that what people choose must be something they prefer to something else they could have afforded but don’t choose.

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Sometimes confusion can be as instructive as precision. The travails of Dubai Inc have left commentators struggling for the right phrase to describe Dubai World and its various siblings. They have come up with various formulations—state-controlled, state-supported, quasi-state, parastatal—without ever quite capturing what they are talking about. And Dubai is not the only place that is challenging the business vocabulary in this way.

Wherever you look you can see the proliferation of hybrid organisations that blur the line between the public and private sector. These are neither old-fashioned nationalised companies, designed to manage chunks of the economy, nor classic private-sector firms that sink or swim according to their own strength. Instead they are confusing entities that seem to flit between one world and another to suit their own purposes.

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The tenth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

Volume 9, Number 10 contains:

• The Use of English at the School of Business and Management, Institut Teknologi Bandung: Investigating Issues Based on Students’ Experience by Andika Putra Pratama and Aries Feizal Firman.
• Multicultural Change in Nonprofit Organizations: A Comparative Literature Review by Maryrose Dolezal.
• Mobilising the Poor for Decision Making: Experiences from among the Ogoni of Taita Taveta District, Kenya by Mary Omosa and Linet Misati.
• Gender Differences In MBA Students: Work-life Balance, Opting Out and the Increasing Importance of Flexibility by Jenny Keil and Karen A. Somerville.
• Organizational Change Skills: A Study of the Literature and the Education Available from American and Canadian MBA Programs by Karen A. Somerville and Karen S. Whelan-Berry.
• Knowledge and Learning Frameworks: The Cyclical Model of Knowledge and Learning and the Knowledge Cube for Higher Education – A Case Study by Janette Young.
• Convergence of Perceptions on Work Related Issues: East Meets West in the 21st Century by Intan Osman, Zainal Ariffin Ahmad and Ummu Kolsome Farouk.
• Encouraging Youth Entrepreneurship: The Role of Institutional Environments and Learning Experiences by Rosemary Kamau-Maina.
• Adaptive Knowledge Management in Organizations by Oleg Tilchin.
• Harmonising Culture in Co-operative Business Ventures: Using a Simulation in Virtual World by Honghong Dai and Jay Bal.

AOL went from pioneering powerhouse to laughed-at laggard when changing technologies made their business model of charging people for e-mail accounts and Internet access obsolete. So now they are remaking the company with an entirely different strategy: selling ads against original content produced by an army of well-paid professional journalists. Unfortunately, that’s the same business model that has driven America’s newspapers to the brink of ruin.

When most people think of AOL, they think of it as the e-mail provider for people who aren’t with it enough to switch to a free service such as Gmail. But while the bulk of AOL’s revenue still comes from its old-school subscribers, the company’s future is in the content business (with a sideline in social networking). In advance of its long-awaited split from Time Warner, which will occur next month, AOL has been on a hiring-and-acquisition spree. It now owns upward of 75 niche blogs and news sites, including DailyFinance.com, Engadget.com, and Fanhouse.com, staffed in large part by reporters who used to work in print. C.E.O. Tim Armstrong said at a conference last month that AOL employs more than 3,000 journalists.

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In the normal run of things the management world is divided into dozens of mutually suspicious tribes—theoreticians versus practitioners, publicity-hogging gurus versus retiring academics, supporters of “scientific” management versus advocates of the “humanistic” sort. But this month has seen unusual comity: the leaders of all the management tribes came together to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Peter Drucker, a man who is often described as “the father of modern management” and “the world’s greatest management thinker”.

The celebrations took place all around the world, most notably in Vienna, where Drucker was born, in southern California, where he spent his golden years, and in China, where he is exercising growing influence. The speakers were not limited to luminaries of management: they also included Rick Warren, the spiritual guru of the moment in America, Frances Hesselbein, a former head of the American Girl Scouts, and David Gergen, an adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents.

To mark the centennial, the Harvard Business Review put a photograph of Drucker on its cover along with the headline: “What Would Peter Do? How his wisdom can help you navigate turbulent times”. Claremont Graduate University in California, where Drucker taught, boasts not one but two institutions that are dedicated to keeping the flame alive: the Peter Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management and the Drucker Institute. The institute acts as the hub of a global network of Drucker societies that are trying to apply his principles to everything from schools to refuse collection. It also produces a “do-it-yourself workshop-in-a-box” called “Drucker Unpacked”.

Why does Drucker continue to enjoy such a high reputation? Part of the answer lies in people’s mixed emotions about management. The management-advice business is one of the most successful industries of the past century. When Drucker first turned his mind to the subject in the 1940s it was a backwater. Business schools were treated as poor relations by other professional schools. McKinsey had been in the management-consulting business for only a decade and the Boston Consulting Group did not yet exist. Officials at General Motors doubted if Drucker could find a publisher for his great study of the company, “Concept of the Corporation”, on the grounds that, as one of them put it, “I don’t see anyone interested in a book on management.”

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The ninth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

Volume 9, Number 9 contains:

• Age and Experience: How Do they Correlate? by Wassim S. Daher.
• How do Students Value Themselves? A Study on Needs and Expectations of Low Achievers by Zahara Abdul Aziz, Amla Salleh and Tarzimah Tambychik.
• Leveraging the Value of an Organizational Change Management Methodology by Dawn-Marie Turner, Jacob Hallencreutz and Helen Haley.
• Building Community at Work: Spirit, Ethics, and Culture by G.L. Reed.
• Addressing Patterns of Passive Learning and Creative Dependency by Kenneth R. Austin.
• Perceptions on Industry Placements: A Scoping Study of Academics in Australia by Roberto Bergami and Annamarie Schuller.
• Navigating the Project Learning Partnership for Michigan Initiative: Lessons Learned from Collaborating and Cooperating for Change in Divergent Organizational Cultures by William Alexander Moylan.
• Shall we Dance? Managing Change from Print-based to Interactive Networked Learning by Cherry Stewart and Rachael Adlington.

• Knowledge Management in Jordanian Banks by Abdallah AL-Shawabkeh and Anthony Tambyrajah.
• The Heart of Managing Change Lies in the Perception of Change itself: Is Change an Opportunity or a Problem? by Gayathri Band.
• Building the Effective Relationship: Its Use in Teaching, Training and Presenting by Heather Dale.
• Education Expenditure and Human Capital Development in Nigeria by Ayoola Sunkanmi Odubunmi.
• Effectively Allocating Resources to Organizational Change: Exploring the Impact of Change Drivers for First-Order and Second-Order Change by Karen S. Whelan-Berry and Karen A. Somerville.
• Control Measures Employed in Technology Transfer in Open Innovation by Hanuv Mann, Uma Kumar and Inder Jit Singh Mann.
• Deliberative Participation: A New Strategy for Enhancing Student Participation in University Governance by Chun-Wen Lin.

Today’s crisis is the result of a catastrophic failure, primarily in the financial system but also of our economic and political systems. Mr Ackoff spent most of the past half-century as the premier evangelist of systemic thinking, which he contrasted with the reductionist, atomistic thinking that had long dominated humanity’s approach to problem-solving in his view. Time and again, he would point out, decision-makers faced with crises failed to heed Albert Einstein’s warning that “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

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This is the idea that products, like people, have a birth, a life and a death, and that they should be financed and marketed with this in mind. Even as a new product is being launched, its manufacturer should be preparing for the day when it has to be killed off. Its sales and profits start at a low level, rise (it is hoped) to a high level and then decline again to a low level. This cycle is sometimes referred to simply as PLC.

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Matrix management is a structure for running those companies that have both a diversity of products and a diversity of markets. In a matrix structure, responsibility for the products goes up and down one dimension and responsibility for the markets goes up and down another. This leaves most managers with a dual reporting line: to the head of their product division on the one hand, and to the head of their geographical market on the other.

Despite the potential confusion that this duality creates, matrix management was enormously popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Leading the fashion was Philips, a Dutch multinational electronics company, which first set up a matrix structure after the second world war. It had national organisations (NOs) and product divisions (PDs), and for a while they operated successfully as a network. The network was held together by a number of coordinating committees, which resolved any conflict between the two.

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