Mopsos

In Napsterize Your Knowledge: Give To Receive the primary lesson is "The more that a company shares its knowledge, the more valuable it becomes". It seems so obvious now than more and more top management speeches emphasize the value of sharing "best practices" across the organization. Yet, very few companies actually give more than lip service to this. Why is that?

Because knowledge sharing is not a new management fad, a trick that makes your company a little more effective. It's a new way of doing business. When we managers encourage the free flow of knowledge inside the organization, we loose control, and this can generate a lot of stress in our minds, because we have made our career precisely on our ability to control. The only way out of this dilemma is up: less bureaucracy, and more vision. We need more Chief Cultural Officers, and less Chief Operating Officers.

The problem is that corporate managers are by essence bureaucrats: They are appointed from the top; they report to the top; the opinions of their subordinates do not really matter. It is thus quite normal for them to prefer outsourcing knowledge (by hiring consultants and by acquiring companies) to cultivating knowledge (by developing education programs and by building communities)

I tend to compare the present shift in management mindsets to the shift that Gorbatchov wanted to introduce in the Nomenklatura of the Communist Party of the USSR: democracy and empowerment, perestroïka and glasnost...

I like this diagram of Prof Goshal. it illustrates what "new management" is gradually becoming:

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