Knowledge Management and Creative Holism in the Knowledge Age

Knowledge is regarded as one of the key determinant factors of a firm's, industry's, or country's survival and growth in the knowledge age. Unlike Drucker, who considered knowledge as the key resource, we now believe other factors, such as the business environment or political factors are just as important as knowledge to firms, industries, and countries. As a matter of fact, we believe that the configuration of various factors as a whole determines the performance of a firm or industry. Or in systems terms: A whole can be greater than, equal to, or perhaps lesser than the sum of its parts. Therefore, knowledge management requires an interdisciplinary study to critically and continuously “sweep in” “new” ideas, approaches, models, and techniques in an informed manner, in both theory and practice, to pursue the notion that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts from the perspective of critical systems thinking (Jackson 2000, 2003, 2005; Gao et al. 2003). To do so, chief knowledge officers (CKOs) and knowledge-related practitioners must also understand the meaning of knowledge and the