Installing Empiricist Values
Knowledge Work is Demanding
The inquiry-cum-commitment Stages are far more demanding of individual managers than the earlier stages. 
It seems that: ►
are much tougher, because they require managers to do two difficult things:
► Adopt a quasi-scientific orientation
Managers must be prepared to investigate for themselves, and must keep abreast of current knowledge. It means understanding the way company information systems are constructed, and using the Internet efficiently. It also means being ready to use evidence and re-think goals when an unpleasant objective reality becomes undeniable.
► Handle the individual v organization duality well
Managers must somehow reconcile the distinctive qualitative knowledge possessed by individuals on the one hand, with routine corporate data, statistical realities and market facts faced by the organization as a whole on the other.
Two Forms of Knowledge
Every individual, including the chief executive, has only a limited and local view of reality. This knowledge slants the way that each contributes to and interprets corporate data and the objective realities which all must accept.
Group convictions can only emerge from corporate data and generally available information, not from the imposition of one person's knowledge on another. Yet personal knowledge and local data must shape group convictions and corporate investigations.
Connecting the two perspectives, individual and group, through mutual inquiry and team learning is essential for the definition of realistic and worthwhile organizational and departmental objectives.
► The limitations and natural degeneration of helps fuel
► a determination to make another transition: to the .
Originally posted: 17-Jun-2011