I have just sent off a version of my report on Organizational Intelligence to the publishers, having spent most of yesterday stripping out loads of material that was (a) a distraction from the main argument (b) underdeveloped and or (c) probably irrelevant. Two people thought that examples from Afghanistan weren't very helpful, and I've also reduced the amount of anecdotal material taken from Malcolm Gladwell's latest book.
As it happens, Gladwell draws heavily on Harold Wilensky's 1967 book on Organizational Intelligence, which I only managed to get a library copy of recently. Wilensky is okay, but my framework for OI derives from some Japanese work from the late 1980s, which was presented at a conference I attended in Paris in 1990. I presented a version of this framework in my 2001 book on the Component-Based Business, and I've been using it more recently as an architectural framework for a whole load of business and technology initiatives, including Enterprise 2.0.
There are several more recent books with the phrase "organizational intelligence" in the title. I haven't read all of them yet, and I'm not promising I ever will, but I've just requested another batch of them from the library. Guessing from the titles and subtitles, some of them appear to regard organizational intelligence as little more than Knowledge Management 2.0, but I'm hoping to find some useful material and ideas anyway.
