Thursday, January 08, 2009

January 13 KM Chicago Meeting Announcement: KM and Organizational Learning

Tuesday, January 13: 5:30pm

For location details, see right-hand column.

Jean Egmon will lead an interactive session on the integration of knowledge management and organizational learning. She will present a conceptual framework, cases and conversations around methods for accelerating innovation while achieving cost savings by blending knowledge management and organizational learning into “design experiments.”

Author of The Prepared Mind: Eight Skills Leaders Use to Innovate, Make Decisions, and Solve Problems published by Jossey-Bass, 2006


Jean Egmon is the executive director of the Ford Center Network, a division of the Ford Center for Global Citizenship within the Kellogg School of Management where she is also a faculty member. Additionally, she is the director of Northwestern University’s Complexity in Action Network. Jean is also the president of Third Angle, Inc. Jean’s work focuses on spotting & leveraging interdependencies across value networks. This means synthesizing information and ideas from diverse sources, working with companies to spot the “third angle,” i.e., a higher order concept of “simple elegance” that enables clients to meet multiple needs of multiple stakeholders at once. From there, she works with clients to design strategies and environments to innovate and make decisions that create a pull for participation across the networks.

Applications of this expertise include: uncovering and exploring new market niches; engaging cross-boundary collaboration for invention and innovation; designing new things to be more easily adopted & viral across customers and employees; employing a design method where interdisciplinary teams approach a variety of business questions with a design mindset and iterate with end users; and designing work to be done by networks.

Jean relies heavily on her interdisciplinary background, and that of her team, in cognition, management, and complexity sciences, marketing and literature to develop frameworks, approaches and tools that help business leaders and scientists see the world with a more connective lens and actively build their own capabilities and applications in these areas.

Organizations with which Jean has worked include: Abbott, Accenture, Bank of America, Boeing, Equity Office Properties, Exelon Corporation, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Kraft, Merck, Proctor & Gamble, Raytheon, Unilever, United Airlines & US Intelligence.

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