Know Your Value, Value What You Know: A Personal System to Manage Your Knowledge (Financial Times Series) Book

The age-old company slogan that "our people are our greatest" asset is true whether business realises it or not. Know Your Value sets out to provide a framework for calculating just how much of an asset you really are to your company--how much is that experience and knowledge worth? Mick Cope passionately believes that knowing your own worth begins with a willingness to accept responsibility for your choices: "You cannot say you don't earn enough because the company won't pay you. In the same way that you make choices about the clothes you buy, the food you eat, or the car you buy, you must now make choices about the way to manage your personal capital." From this point, the book explores the value of knowledge--and the relative value of sharing, retaining and exploiting that knowledge. For example, revealing knowledge explicitly and tacitly can affect your own personal worth to an organisation--and different approaches are best suited to different occasions. Following Cope's argument allows the reader to create their own K-Profile. This will allow you to map your own personal capital and will--in theory--reveal where you are not exploiting your own assets. To get to this stage, however, is no mean feat: the book is laden with jargon, and can feel something like a psychology textbook. It's worth the effort though. K-Profile created, the second half of the book provides concrete advice on your own personality type and your attitude to knowledge. Each possible outcome of the profile is discussed, with up and downsides. Categories discussed include experts, foragers, brokers and apprentices. For each category, there is also a negative characteristic--amateurs, egotists, freeloaders and blockers. Behind the jargon and inexplicable tables, this book has real practical value for knowledge workers--allowing them to recognise their own value and use that knowledge to improve communication skills, and point out pitfalls particular to a given personality. --Sally WhittleRead More