Recently in knowledge-conscious management Category

Last friday, I e-mailed some colleague in my company to ask her for some information. This morning, I got a reply telling me that I should ask another person, and she gave me the name.
I find this behavior typical of the industrial age organization, where people define themselves by the tasks they have been assigned to. Whatever falls outside is not to be taken care of. In a post-industrial networked culture, she would have forwarded the message to the right person, and copied me. The difference is subtle, but real.

Interesting post on Trusted Advisor Associates > Trust Matters

• 1. The best trust isn’t very transferable


• 2. Deep digital trust is a tradeoff for breadth; trusting you to sell me a book doesn't mean I'll introduce you to my daughter


• 3. Saying “I’m trustworthy” means you aren’t


• 4. As in the meatosphere, all is not what it seems.

It strikes me that many people think about trust within the framework of a market economy, like something you can build in a client-supplier framework. I don't see the people I trust as clients or suppliers. I think that building trust is precisely about trying to get out of the typical client-supplier relationship, even if in the end you cannot, because your level of trust doesn't go as far as to let your customer decide whether she is going to pay you or not. Some emphasize the need for "customer attitude", claiming that all employees of a company should be focused on the customer's satisfaction to the point of obsession. "Take care of the customer, and the rest will take care of itself". Yeah. Right.

Now, it really depends on the kind of obsession you are talking about. To me obsession, unlike love or friendship, is a kind of disease. If your "obsession" is really about making your numbers, your customer will hear it loud and clear no matter what. When a salesman is after your wallet, you can feel it, and you come to hate this sales person for the rest of your life. I still hate that SOB from Lawless Inc. in Woburn, MA. who took advantage of me as a French expatriate and sold me my new car back in August 1998.

Building trust with your customer is about showing respect for her, both through your competence and through your benevolence. It only can happen if you are convinced in your heart that the sale ends when your customer's job is done, not when you close the deal.

Competence is deep knowledge of your business. Benevolence is consistently walking the extra mile for your customer, when nobody -not even your boss- expects you to do so. It could be surprising that so few companies are truly concerened by the trust of their customers. How many actually engage their employees into a consistent and high level learning experience about the business? How many allow their employees to build personal relationships with the customers? Art Kleiner gave an reason for that. In a company, he says, who really matters is not so much the customer but the core group of company leaders. Earning the trust of customers will not serve your career as much as earning the trust company leaders. The two can sometimes be correlated, especially when there is a major crisis taking place. But oftentimes - especially in large companies - they are not, because of politics. Read Dilbert.

[Thanks Dominique]

When companies relate their "values" to the way they handle customers, they only state the reason for their existence. "We are focused on the customer" is like saying "We work to eat". Right. It has nothing to do with ethics.

Real values appear start to show when the company gives away something to its customers for free without expecting anything in return, when it is absolutely unnecessary, out of pure benevolence. They also show in the company's attitude towards the weaker part of its constituency i.e. its low-level employees, when it strives to give them personal development opportunities. But the single and most clear sign of the values conveyed by an company can be seen in its attitude towards its suppliers. If it squeezes the profit margins away from them and dumps them whenever they get a better deal elsewhere, it really shows that its "values" boil down to survival of the fittest. Pure social darwinism and nothing else.

Why Knowledge Management is so important from Dave Pollard is really an interesting post. I fully agree with Dave's conclusion that "the current de-emphasizing of Knowledge Management is a tragic mistake". I have been wondering in the last two years why so many interesting KM initiatives of the late 90's finally ended up nowhere, in spite of evidence that they did create substantial value for the firm. Dave gives a few reasons why business leaders and KM leaders have such a hard time understanding each other. Though I don't really buy the short term vs. long term argument - Some KM initiatives indeed show very short-term results in terms of new capabilities and new business - I fully agree with his claim that the "vertical" view of the industrial age firm according to which managers think and decide whereas employees execute and give feedback is the major cultural obstacle

Business leaders are accustomed to knowledge being transferred top-down (instruction and formal training programs) and information for decision-making being polled from the front lines (...)Business leaders see their leadership role as critical to the organization's success; their frame of understanding is hierarchical -- they tend to believe that knowledge and value increases with experience and that rewards should go disproportionately to identified superstars and up-and-coming leadership candidates. KM leaders see contribution to organizational success as more egalitarian, and are more likely to believe (as Drucker says) that almost every employee today knows how to do his/her particular job better than anyone else (including the boss) -- they may see large wage and reward disparities as demotivating and unwarranted.

What is frightening is to find so many similarities between our large industrial multi-layered organizations and the former Soviet Union, which proved totally incapable of modernizing itself and eventually collapsed. In one of his books I read a few years ago, Mikha�l Gorbatchev wrote that one of his big mistake was to try to introduce elections in the communist party for some key positions at the local level, instead of assigning them from the top down. He didn't anticipate such a high level of resistance to change. According to him, the reason is that the type of people who win elections and those who succeed in a bureaucracy are from two different worlds.

Maybe what is happening in big organizations is more or less the same. Why would business leaders want to introduce powerful networks and communities inside their organizations if all end up challenging the "normal" way of doing business that made them successful in the first place? I now tend to think that KM methods and tools will first be experienced at the personal level (phase 1), then in small companies and within alliances of small companies (phase 2) and then in large companies when they start loosing business to small companies (phase 3).

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...