William H.A. Johnson

This book influenced me greatly as a PhD student studying knowledge management and trying to integrate strategy, organizational design and operational processes via the study of innovation processes. While there are many other great influential books in the area like Personal Knowledge by M. Polanyi, the Nonaka and Takeuchi book provided me with the template on organizational knowledge creation processes, which I then extended to the inter-organizational setting. This essentially became the underlying model for my dissertation, which was to start my career as an academic and eventually tenured professor. It is also the book largely responsible (for good or bad!) for the proliferation of the terms explicit and tacit knowledge in the management arts and sciences.