Out of The Box - Week Ending 04/09

It's official, dim sum is dead in Atlanta! For the third time in two months I've attempted to satiate my appetite for the little bites of Chinese culinary goodness (at three different, formerly brilliant) restaurants and the for the third - at last time - I've been disappointed with food that is served cold (off of steaming carts, no less) and fails to please the palate. Thank God for Pho!

Anyway, the last week - when I haven't been obsessed with food - I've been thinking a lot about how the lack of understanding of KM among organizational leadership contributes to the failure of KM initiatives. This week's mix of articles provide some truly out of the box insight into KM branding and re-thinking the role and influence of KM.

• Knowledge in action!The role of social influence in surging autism diagnoses makes me wonder how and what organization's transmit KM knowledge and awareness, externally, from their clients and competitors and, internally, from one another.
• (Not so new) Trend of the Week: Crowdsourcing Popular, neologistic term, for outsourcing tasks to a large, diffuse group, usually without monetary compensation. While companies who attempt to abuse this concept will, inevitably, hit a wall, it's a fantastic way to engage your audience as part of your branding strategy.
• The fascinating Nature.com article, Learning in the wild, points out the relationship between learning and personal interest; basically, people learn and take the time to become informed when a subject is personal. Knowledge managers looking to Brand their strategies and improve strategy adoption should learn from this insight.
• Shout out to mystrategicplan.com for connecting me to Pamela Slim's Escape from Cubicle Nation blog
• Question of the Week: Is it possible to create workspaces and workplaces that influence the creation, flow, and capture of knowledge?
• Guerrilla marketing at its finest, now I just need to figure out how to leverage this from a KM perspective.
• What role does your KM strategy play in providing input into the content and format of your companies annual report.
• Reputation management in the digital space. Well written post from Mark Pollard on Cadbury's foray into social media