Recently in The knowledge sharing economy Category

In Business Week, a harsh article with a tough title:"Wall Street's Crime Against Humanity"

The point made in this great article is that greed created a system in which

we see that just about everyone accepted a reckless system that rewards transactions but rejects responsibility for the consequences of those transactions.

True, but I also think that putting the blame on Wall Street is too easy. I think that the main problem in this financial crisis is that information systems and mathematical models used in the finance industry have become so sophisticated that eventually nobody really understands how they work. People use them without any critical thinking on the assumptions behind the underlying models, especially with respect to risk management. It has something to do with the Stanford Prison Experiment, where basic students started behaving like demons because they were placed in a system that called for this kind of behavior, and because they did not find the courage within themselves to apply critical thinking to what they were doing.Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a whole book on this: "The Black Swan"
So one word of wisdom for our knowledge economy could be: use with extreme cautious any computer-based application that you don't fully understand inside out. This holds for sophisticated trading software as well as for Facebook or Twitter. I am sometimes appalled by the carelessness of many clueless users of those tools who put themselves at risk as well as others because they don't spend enough time to try and understand.

From Cory Doctorow in Boing-Boing about France's new copyright law proposal requiring ISPs to police their clients:

For the first time in either Europe or North America, Big Content will be able to offload the tiresome and expensive work of copyright enforcement to ISPs and the commission called for by the law. (...) As a result, the procedure by which French people lose their right to communicate online will be automatic, faceless and instantaneous. The process by which they protest their innocence and get the right to communicate back will be slow, bureaucratic, and manual.

Are we preparing a breach in the independence of justice? How about asking for the banks to monitor the use of funds by their clients and close their accounts whenever the use of funds is deemed unlawful, like bribery for example?

Many KM gurus I meet are surprised by the rather sudden and unexpected lack of interest for knowledge management as a consulting practice, especially in this country, where some of the former leading KM consulting firms are in deep trouble or out of business. It is stange indeed, when so many publications announce that the "knowledge revolution" is under way and that "victory will go to the smartest nations and countries" (Newsweek), which is precisely what KM strives to achieve.

Does this mean that we don't need KM consultants any more because KM has become a mainstream practice? Or rather, does this mean that the market has shifted elsewhere and that we should adapt? I think the latter of course.

From an article in the Harvard Business Review on Innovation, Networks and KM at Procter & Gamble:

Procter & Gamble’s development and implementation of connect and develop has unfolded over many years. There have been some hiccups along the way, but largely it has been a methodical process of learning by doing, abandoning what doesn’t work and expanding what does. Over five years in, we’ve identified three core requirements for a successful connect-and-develop strategy.

• Never assume that “ready to go” ideas found outside are truly ready to go. There will always be development work to do, including risky scale-up.
• Don’t underestimate the internal resources required. You’ll need a full-time, senior executive to run any connect-and-develop initiative.
• Never launch without a mandate from the CEO. Connect and develop cannot succeed if it’s cordoned off in R&D. It must be a top-down, companywide strategy.

This applies to all corporate KM initiatives, regardless of the domain.

In a recent post, Stowe introduces The Conversational Index which measures how much conversation is happening on a blog as opposed to pure broadcast. Basically, you should have more comments and trackbacks than posts, otherwise you are just sending messages in a bottle from your little island.

My CI index is low, even with the spam comments and trackbacks. Maybe I should write more about Britney Spears...