Nonaka and Takeuchi may also be guilty of selec-

tive interpretation of at least some aspects of the

'traditional' view of management science. For exam-

ple, their description of the focus of systems thinking

and the learning organization as being on 'learning

with the mind, not with the body' ignores the rich

systems tradition of model-building and 'manage-

ment flight simulators', 1 of creating learning envi-

ronments within which learning with the body rein-

forces learning with the mind. The model of exter-

nalization that Nonaka and Takeuchi present, of

association through metaphor and analogy to articu-

late tacit knowledge, is an approach that has been

richly developed in the mainstream management sci-

ence literature over the past 20 years.

To explain how Japanese organizations approach

innovation, and the new product development pro-

cess in particular, Nonaka and Takeuchi synthesize

the individual components and dichotomics of

knowledge creation into innovative and compelling

concepts. These concepts are captured through

phrases such as the 'spiral of organizational knowl-

edge creation' and 'middle-up-down' management.

To illustrate these concepts in practice, Nonaka and

Takeuchi draw upon a variety of case studies of

Japanese organizational innovation. Some of their

examples very effectively convey the concepts they

describe. The Matsushita Home Bakery develop-

ment, for example, illustrates the repeated cycling

between all four modes of knowledge creation. The

story of the development of the Nissan Primera

shows the lengths to which companies may need to

go in managing socialization.

Yet it is in illuminating the concept of externaliza-

tion, the knowledge creation mode that Nonaka and

Takeuchi feel is so poorly understood, that their

examples seem the weakest. It is hard to understand

how slogans such as 'Let's gamble', 'Man-maxi-

mum, Machine-minimum' and 'Tall Boy' effec-

tively make tacit concepts explicit. When Nonaka

and Takeuchi go on to reconstruct the role of middle

management in terms of translating between the

For example Morecroft (1988) stresses the role of modeling

as part of an iterative learning process, as part a process of

translation between tacit and explicit modes of learning.

z For example Morgan, 1986, op cit.

slogans of top management ('Let's gamble') and

objectives for design engineers ('Tall Boy') it be-

comes even more difficult to grasp the range of

activities that 'knowledge engineers' discharge. Only

by digging beneath the slogans can we understand

exactly what the skilled knowledge engineer role

involves. The authors manage this best in their de-

scription of the externalization process Matsushita

engineers undertook to capture the tacit knowledge

of a master baker and embody this in the explicit

design principle of a 'twisting stretch'.

A key area in which I feel Nonaka and Takeuchi's

frameworks and case examples fall short is in ex-

plaining how their model of knowledge creation

develops over time, across and between individual

new product developments. Utterback (1994) and

Christensen (1992) among others stress the impor-

tance of looking at innovation over multiple innova-

tion cycles as organizations and approaches that have

succeeded during one innovation cycle fail in the

next. While Nonaka and Takeuchi set out to explain

'why certain Japanese companies have been continu-

ally successful in innovation' [italics added] all of

their examples focus upon single product develop-

ments or upon the application of similar concepts

and approaches in linked product developments.

It is in the organizational dimension, the design of

organization structures to span multiple innovation

and knowledge creation cycles, that managing over

time is most important. Nonaka and Takeuchi do not

explain how organizations should re-invent their

knowledge and abilities but instead hold out the

'hypertext organization', simultaneously bureaucrati-

cally efficient yet able to put together innovative task

forces, as a universal organizational solution.