Type: book

Book by Patrick Lambe: “A knowledge audit provides an “at a glance” view of an organization’s needs and opportunities. Its purpose is to improve an organization’s effectiveness through a better understanding of the dynamics and levers of knowledge production, access, and use. However, this developing field is hampered by the lack of a common language about the origins and nature of knowledge auditing. In Principles of Knowledge Auditing, Patrick Lambe integrates the theory and practices of the field, laying out principles and guidelines for a clearer and more pragmatic approach to knowledge auditing that makes it more accessible to practitioners and researchers.

Lambe examines knowledge auditing in the context of the development of communications, information, and knowledge management in the twentieth century. He critiques and clarifies ambiguities in how knowledge audits are approached and described, as well as how the results are conveyed within organizations. He discusses the benefits and risks of knowledge management standards. Knowledge auditors, he says, need a common frame of reference more than they need standards. Standards have their uses, but they provide only markers and signposts and are poor representations of the richness of the landscape. He concludes with a set of guiding principles for practitioners…(More)”.

Book review by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn: “Whether in cataclysmic losses, trials and tribulations, or just everyday disappointments, life offers opportunities for it to fall short and for us to fall short. Isn’t it bad enough that we fail so often, and fall so hard, with such devastating consequences? When it comes to failure of whatever stripe, can’t we just follow in the footsteps of the stoic Captain Call and “ride off from it”?

The philosopher Costică Brădățan, who is also Los Angeles Review of Books religion and comparative studies editor, answers with an unequivocal no. Instead, he asks us to hold our horses and embrace failures of all kinds, from mere shortcomings to death. And in In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, he devotes his considerable powers of observation to the distinct potential of the acceptance of failure to liberate.

The book begins with a moment of panic in an imagined scenario in which a plane engine has caught fire and passengers face the possibility of their imminent demise. In this case, all are fine after a safe landing, but such scares, according to Brădățan, make us realize that our life is just a brief moment between “two instantiations of nothingness”: “Nothing first—dense, impenetrable nothingness. Then a flickering. Then nothing again, endlessly.” His premise is that the reality of death and the individual human’s smallness in relation to space and time—“We are next to nothing, in fact”—lies behind most of our endeavors, from religion to art, which “seek to make this unbearable fact a little more bearable.” Yet many such endeavors only obscure the fundamental reality of things. Instead, Brădățan calls for an “eyes-wide-open approach” that can remove us from our immediate surroundings and allow for the contemplation needed to transform this reality. Far from being an occasional exception, failure is an inherent part of human life. He suggests that direct confrontation with failures large and small can provide a “failure-based therapy” to help us handle this fact…(More)”.