February 2005 Archives

I like the idea that Knowledge Management is really about Knowledge Conscious Management, or to put it differently, Managing in the Knowledge Age as Professor Klaus North puts it. Incidentally, this explains why it is so difficult to introduce in 20th century organizations, which do not recognize mastery of knowledge flows as a source of competitive advantage.

The HR department of my company asked me to write a short memo and call it "the ten commandments of knowledge management". I thought it was a good idea -KM is a faith with its manifesto (e.g Cluetrain)-, but couldn't find enough time to reduce everything to ten commandments, and I have eighteen!

Let me know your thoughts...

Dishost from Belgium provides "web-hosting services with a pinch of clean energy". Another sign of the importance of meaning and ecosystem niches in the knowledge age

From Clay Shirky

If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy (...) “Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

Partly true. Social Software is both stuff that can get you laid, and stuff that can let you laid off, because managers will always pay, and pay dearly, to remain in control of information flows. But maybe Clay would argue that this is not about changing the world but maintaining the status quo.

Intel president Paul Otellini writes a blog, which theoretically only employees can read. Of course, there were leaks in the press which brought Mr. Otellini to be more careful. He is said to have written in a recent post:

While this is intended as an internal blog, I recognize that it will become public -- welcome to the Internet! As a result, please recognize that I may be a bit limited in my comments and responses to protect Intel.

Does this mean that bloggers are bound to express public opinions and never be in a position to control their audience? I don't think so. Sooner or later, I will be opening another blog on topics similar to the present one, but where I will be disclosing much more sensitive issues. I will want my readership to be run as a tight community with a constitution on how information is managed. This is what I would expect from the commmunity of interest of my company's employees, in particular, which means that the Intel guy who leaked the info should be identified and judged according to the laws of Intel regarding information security. But this is also what I will be expecting from the "community of obligation" of my family. If family pictures end up in a magazine, I will want to know how they got there.

10 ways to use blogs for managing projects by Tim Duckett, an english type. That's how the list goes (my comments in brackets):

• 1-Communicating with project stakeholders


• 2-Replacing paper


• 3-Building issue logs


• 4-Capturing information snippets: from shared passwords to useful URLs to code snippets (I like that one)


• 5-Publicising the project progress


• 6-Reducing email overload (Yeah... to some extent. Collaborative platforms are much better for that)


• 7-Capturing requirements


• 8-Circulating screenshots


• 9-Keeping team members up-to-date (via RSS, provided they use it)


• 10-Provide an automatic audit trail (yes, yes, yes!)

And, of course, it's cheap. O the other hand I still haven't figured out a simple way to install a blog server within my company's VPN without asking for permission from people who don't have a clue, and who will pretend we can do exactly the same using the company portal.

Recruiting quizzes at Google presented during their analyst day on Feb 9. look a little destabilizing, don't they?

The recruiting process really looks like an exam. As a programmer, you're given a coding problem. As a salesperson, you're asked to pitch Google salespeople. As a marketer, you're asked to make a marketing pitch to the management etc.

Charlie Wood just completed the proof of concept of a tool that allows him to get new leads from Salesforce.com via RSS. To quote:

Wow, from the surge in traffic to the site, I think this is proving to be a popular concept.

Definitely.

So Carly Fiorina was fired, and was given a $21 millions severance package for failing the merger of HP and Compaq, as many anticipated would happen anyway.

Regardless of the outrageous "compensation for failing" -which is downright sickening and shows the dark side of modern capitalism- this is to be compared with the success so far of the Renault-Nissan merger, which I believe should be regarded as a very good -if not best- business practice. To me the main difference lies in the figure of the CEO, and his/her egomania. For Carly Fiorina of HP, the merger with Compaq was a personal challenge. It had to happen as fast as possible and driven from the top-down. For Louis Schweitzer of Renault, a much more low-profile person who had the failure of the Renault-Volvo deal in mind, the merger with Nissan was to happen in due time after
a) Nissan was succesfully turned around
b) the corporate cultures of Renault and Nissan were driven close enough.
The reality is that it takes time and determination to merge two cultures. You just don't command it just because you're the boss.
Human beings are usually fascinated by egomaniacs and dictators - the willingness of man to obey is unfathomed - And yet dictatorships always end up in disaster, just because many brains in parallel always outwit the single brain, however bright.

Incidentally, French capitalism has won a battle here. Commentators tend to downplay the oligopolistic pratices of French business, and to mock the business practices of our country. I often do myself. But in the specific case of Renault-Nissan, it's "hats off". Let's just hope that Carlos Ghosn will stay cold-blooded and avoid becoming an egomaniac himself, isolated from reality by a thick layer of obedient courtmen, now that he is worshipped as a god-like figure.

From Chris Anderson through Dan Gilmore again.

Today in the US the newspaper is fading, as is its influence on American journalism: news and information is becoming a commodity. What will rise as a differentiating competitive advantage? I'd argue that it's not so much pure opinion and political partisanship (although that's been the case on radio) as it is sensibility and worldview.

This is also food for thought with respect to the business world. Corporate Marcom people -and top managers- still find a lot of value in broadcasting "official" (a.k.a. censored) information to employees through "official" media like the corporate intranet or the corporate magazine, not always realizing that employees are better informed -and by all means far quicker- through outside business news, community sites and now blogs, which, as Chris suggests convey far more worldview and meaning.

I do pay attention though to official messages broadcasted by my company's communication staff, but only to have a better grasp on the messages that top management really wants to promote. From a political/career management standpoint, it is indeed key. But from a business standpoint -the customer's perspective- it is more and more questionable.

Newsweek: The Connected Get More Connected.

This month, 100 of Silicon Valley s top venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, bloggers and promoters will begin receiving cool new stuff for free, delivered straight to their homes and offices. In return, these movers and shakers promise to sample the products and offer feedback to the their manufacturers. The companies hope that, if the mood strikes, the Silicon Valley 100 will chat up, blog on, or just plain recommend the products to friends and colleagues, generating that most invaluable of currencies: buzz.

That's the economy of networks. The more networked, the more you courted. You don't necessarily attract headhunters and job offers, but you do receive a lot of little gifts that indeed save you a lot of money and time. I just came to realize that I now attend most conferences on KM for free now. I pay by delivering a speech, which is far less costly and much more fun too. But some people's networks are so dense that they can actually get paid for it. Now there is growing ad money for blogs. Treonauts has only $7000 of advertising revenues a month, but apparently Sony now pays $25,000 a Month for Gawker Blog! What strikes me however is that revenues appear as a by-product of these blogging initiatives. First authors invest their knowledge and their time rather than their money. They blog merely because they have something interesting to say which is recognized as such by their readers. Money revenues come later as a sign of success. In the knowledge age, it looks like attention is the scarce resource, not money.

[through Dan Gillmore ]

Over nine hundred Microsoft employees have unique individual blogs. A list of them can be found here
Novell already lists employee blogs in their company directory along with the employee’s email address. Boeing's and GM's senior execs are starting to write blogs themselves.

Mmmh.

"Power to the Edge", by David Alberts and Richard Hayes, is a book I downloaded here (beware! 4 Megs pdf file) after reading Ray Ozzie's comment.

I just finished, and it is an absolutely fascinating piece of work. I will comment on it later. I truly see this concept of "Power to the Edge" as the epitome of KM. If you understand Network Centric Warfare, you will also understand what the "Network Centric Business" of the future looks like.