Interview with Richard McDermott, co-author of the recently released book, Cultivating Communities of Practice. You should probably read this article in order to get a certain perspective on communities of practice. It's not one that I share, really. I am one of the sort of people that McDermott thinks "do more harm than good" because I tend to resist measurements of "value received" from communities of practice. It's like measuring the ROI of water-cooler conversations: sure, you could do it, but what then? Structured water-cooler conversations? Streamlined (no talk about hockey, please) water-cooler conversations? I also draw a distinction between communities of practice - which center around a discipline or area of interest - and online communication within a single organization, which centers around an enterprise. The two are very different things, with very different inputs, outcomes and values. Now it's not that I, as McDermott suggests, "misunderstand what it takes to become genuinely influential in a business." It's that I think that a community of practice, properly understood, related to individual - not business - objectives.CRLF
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