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Knowing “What” to do is not Enough: Turning Knowledge into Action
Abstract
Why, in light of all the substantial resources firms devote to improving their performance, do so few management practices actually change? In fact, knowledge management at many companies often makes the knowing-doing gap worse. This article explains why firms find it so difficult to translate knowledge into practice and offers a set of guidelines that address the sources of this problem. Knowing what to do is not enough; the challenge for managers is to figure out how to do what they know needs to be done.
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Citations
Cited by
Tranfield, D., Denyer, D., & Smart, P. (2003) · British Journal of Management · doi:10.1111/1467-8551.00375 · Cited by 15,386
Design Thinking: Past, Present and Possible Futures
Johansson‐Sköldberg, U., Woodilla, J., & Çetinkaya, M. (2013) · Creativity and Innovation Management · doi:10.1111/caim.12023 · Cited by 1,163
Cross-cultural competence in international business: toward a definition and a model
Johnson, J. P., Lenartowicz, T., & Apud, S. (2006) · Journal of International Business Studies · doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400205 · Cited by 909
Toward an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Research Program
Wurth, B., Stam, E., & Spigel, B. (2022) · Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice · doi:10.1177/1042258721998948 · Cited by 789
“The principles, despite being context-dependent, would improve the implementation of ecosystem research and address the knowledge-practice gap (cf. Pfeffer & Sutton, 1999).”
An operational model for mainstreaming ecosystem services for implementation
Cowling, R. M., Egoh, B., Knight, A. T., O'Farrell, P. J., Reyers, B., Rouget, M., Roux, D. J., Welz, A., & Wilhelm-Rechman, A. (2008) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0706559105 · Cited by 649
Metadata
- Authors
- Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. I.
- Venue
- California Management Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1999-10
- Volume
- 42
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 83-108
- ISSN
- 0008-1256 (ISSN-L)
- 2162-8564
- OpenAlex
- W1973291189
- Cited by
- 438
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 53.53
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)
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- Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. I. (1999). Knowing “What” to do is not Enough: Turning Knowledge into Action. California Management Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/000812569904200101
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
