Above and Beyond KM

It’s raining in New York City. In fact it’s been raining for days and days with no end in sight. The net result is a subdued, gloomy, sodden town.

Although I’d much prefer blue skies and sunny weather, I must admit that the weather is strangely appropriate this week as we prepare for the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. All around us are signs of that anniversary:  notices of solemn remembrance services, TV and radio shows recounting the events and their aftermath, and a heightened police presence.  This week of all weeks we are reminded that things have not been the same since 9/11.

In a post I wrote in 2008, 9/11 and Knowledge Management, I noted that investigations after the attacks revealed that the government had had much of the information that it needed to identify and counteract the 9/11 plot. However, some of that information was located in silos and protected by departmental rivalries. According to the 9/11 Commission’s Report:

The FBI did not have the capability to link the collective knowledge of agents in the field to national priorities.
…
The missed opportunities to thwart the 9/ 11 plot were also symptoms of a broader inability to adapt the way government manages problems to the new challenges of the twenty-first century. Action officers should have been able to draw on all available knowledge about al Qaeda in the government. Management should have ensured that information was shared and duties were clearly assigned across agencies, and across the foreign-domestic divide. … The U. S. government did not find a way of pooling intelligence and using it to guide the planning and assignment of responsibilities for joint operations involving entities as disparate as the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the military, and the agencies involved in homeland security.

Last week, John Moore published an article entitled How knowledge management helps keep the US attack free in which he describes how much has changed since 9/11:

Although the attack and its aftermath affected broad swaths of IT, it also helped transform one area of particular importance to the homeland security community: the collection of tools, technologies and practices, known as knowledge management.

Originally considered a means of preserving the institutional memory of longtime workers as they moved from one job to another or retired, the 2001 terrorist attacks brought an urgency to the uses of KM as a tool for intelligence collaboration and coordination, according to experts in the government IT community.

…knowledge management practices expanded to accommodate more ways to aggregate and share critical information. From an architectural point of view, installations are less monolithic. Single knowledge repositories are giving way to multiple databases. Agencies may wield a number of collaboration tools to curate intelligence insights as opposed to a single, specifically designated knowledge management system. [emphasis added]

In that article Moore gives some interesting details regarding how government agencies have used the experience of 9/11, coupled with the availability of new tools, to change the way they handle their information:

• Widespread use of tools such as portals (e.g., Microsoft’s SharePoint), unified communications and social media “have pulled knowledge management in new directions.”
• “Defense Knowledge Online, which had been a critical DOD knowledge management system, is giving way to file sharing among the rank and file using Microsoft SharePoint.”
• “DISA’s Defense Connect Online, a 380,000-user network … lets personnel exchange unclassified and secret information with authorized mission partners” using conferencing and chat tools.
• The Army is emphasizing communities of practice, in which personnel with longtime professional interests in common share information. Its Army Professional Forums include more than 200,000 members. These forums use collaboration tools such as wikis, Google Docs and online conferences.
• Rather than acquiring a single monolithic purpose-built KM system, agencies are working to harness the various resources they already have and then to share those resources across agencies.
• Key elements of this new approach are portals, collaboration products, unified communications systems and social media tools (including effective search engines).

As a taxpayer, I’m relieved to learn that our public servants have been improving how our government works.  But I must admit that I’m curious to know the extent to which private organizations have improved the way they handle information.

• How widespread is the use of collaboration tools and social media within your organization?
• Do you have a portal or other significant knowledge repository that is central to your business and widely used?
• Do your personnel operate in a vacuum within their own information silos or is there widespread sharing of critical information across functional groups?
• Do you have an effective search engine that can help surface information hidden in silos?
• Have you created communities of practice that actively share useful information?

If you don’t have positive responses to these questions, what has your knowledge management group been doing these last 10 years? Paul Romer once famously quipped that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” If the most significant result of 9/11 is enhanced security in your office building, you have wasted a wonderful opportunity to change things for the better.

[Photo Credit: Guillaume Cattiaux]

This session is presented by John Stepper (Deutsche Bank) and Bryce Williams (Eli Lilly).  You can find the session slides athttp://www.e2conf.com/boston/2011/presentations/workshops.  Username: workshop; Password: boston2011.

[These are my notes from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2011 in Boston.  Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error.  Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• Some Big Challenges of Working in a Regulated Industries
  • “Regulations present a perfect reason to do nothing.” Some of this is because few truly understand the rules, although all fear them.  Therefore, there is little incentive to change what works.
  • Early in the process, involve the key people who understand the regulations and need to be part of developing your governance structure. Build smart compliance into your system.
  • Even if you are being innovative, try to find precedents in your industry so that people in your company aren’t faced with the daunting task of testing the rules. Membership in organizations like the Social Business Council can help you learn about success stories in your industry.
  • Take smart risks. Some risk is necessary for innovation, but don’t bite off more than you can chew.  Incremental change is better.
• Communities of Practice. Start here.  They are focused on real business issues and are close to the frontlines. Use the experience of your communities of practice to identify and spread success stories and best practices. Consider bringing community leaders together into an internal council to help with compliance.
• Eli Lilly’s Social Collaboration. They had some challenges related to regulation and existing technology.
  • Their collaboration tool could house only transitory information.  No documents of record.
  • For privacy reasons, they could not pre-populate the collaboration space with content. Further, they decided not to link to their document management system.
  • They had to use an opt-in method, rather than rolling it out across the enterprise with a full participation default.
  • They had to integrate their SharePoint Portal with their Jive collaboration platform.
  • They used their collaboration tool to facilitate internal communications in connection with various Eli Lilly events (e.g. anniversary celebrations, humanitarian efforts, etc.)
  • They use the tool to crowdsource news, activities and events with community questions/clarifications.
• Key Benefit of Eli Lilly Social Business Effort. It makes it easy for Eli Lilly people to help their colleagues.
• What about SharePoint? Consider the waste and expense associated with users across the enterprise trying to turn SharePoint into a collaborative website. If you implement a proper social business tool, you will spend a great deal less on SharePoint waste.  With those cost savings, all the proven benefits of collaboration within the enterprise are just gravy.
• Focus on Value. One key value of collaborative tools is that they help reduce the number of times the same questtion needs to be answered time and time again.  Before launch, consider asking the service/answer providers within your organization to pre-populate your collaboration tool with FAQs and answers to questions that are critical. This should help reduce their workload going forward.

If there are days when you doubt the value of knowledge management, take a closer look at Project ECHO:  it saves lives by sharing specialist knowledge from teaching hospitals with a wide network of primary care physicians in far-flung areas.  As a a result, the patients in those areas get the benefit of cutting edge medical treatment without having to travel hundreds of miles to academic centers.

Founded by Dr. Sanjeev Arora and his colleagues at the University of New Mexico, Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (Project ECHO) has become a shining model for innovative medical practices and for KM.  Here’s the back story:

In 2003, nearly 30,000 New Mexicans were infected with Hepatitis C, yet only 5 percent were able to access treatment which is available almost exclusively through specialists at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Albuquerque. The plight of these underserved patients inspired Sanjeev Arora, one of the top Hep C specialists in the country to develop a plan to deliver state of the art treatment to these communities through Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes).

Project ECHO creates a one-to-many “knowledge network” of specialists and … rural providers, who meet by videoconference to co-manage specific patients and share two-way teachings in which the ECHO staff works with remote clinics to coordinate and educate. Sanjeev calls this aspect of ECHO the “workforce multiplier.”  Through the “knowledge networks” of the clinics, specialists co-manage patients and teach rural medical professionals to be mini-specialists, to whom patients from that area are increasingly referred, This eventually saturates the state with the ability to treat Hep C and also helps deconstruct stereotypes and prejudices that often have existed between specialists and providers.

By pushing the ability to treat chronic, complex diseases down the work chain, ECHO is not only bringing specialized treatment to thousands of patients who would have otherwise gone untreated, but it is also keeping remote providers where they are most needed. Retention rates for rural medical professionals in New Mexico are notoriously low, and Sanjeev’s work is changing this by empowering isolated providers with stimulating, practical, cost-effective continuing education.

The key components of Project ECHO are:

• Use technology to leverage and share scarce specialist knowledge through knowledge networks
• Create best practice protocols for treating complex diseases and then share the protocols with primary care clinicians
• Specialists in academic centers mentor physicians in rural areas using the same case-based learning these doctors learned in medical school
  • through videoconferences, groups of rural physicians hold “virtual rounds” in which they present cases and collaborate with academic and rural colleagues to identify the best course of treatment
  • these sessions build communities of practice and facilitate knowledge sharing, thereby spreading expertise across the state
• Use the internet to track outcomes in order to have the metrics necessary to establish ROI on the program
• Knowledge sharing + mentoring + technology act together as a “force multiplier” for the delivery of high-quality services

While you may not have the responsibility for saving lives in your daily work, Project ECHO is a wonderful reminder that smart KM together with good technology can have a transformative effect.  Remember that on the days when you find yourself struggling with KM skeptics.

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Here are some brief videos that will tell you more about the impressive work of Project ECHO:

Project ECHO: Spreading Access to Quality Healthcare:

Project ECHO:

TEDMED Q&A with Dr. Sanjeev Arora, Project ECHO Director:

A new Canadian study reveals that companies are suffering from a “knowledge hiding” epidemic.  Or, as Kimberly Weisul puts it, the $73 billion that companies spent on knowledge management software in 2008 (according to AMR research) might possibly be a complete waste.

That’s a thought that should strike terror in the heart of every knowledge management professional.

So what’s going on?  Apparently, companies have invested in marvelous (and expensive) knowledge management systems without first properly identifying and addressing the barriers to knowledge sharing that exist within their organizations.  As a result, their systems lack the key content that make them mission critical. Instead, the people with the goods are keeping them hidden.

The study by Catherine Connelly, Jane Webster and David Zweig cites the following popular methods of knowledge hiding:

• ignoring requests for assistance
• claiming that the requested information is confidential and cannot be shared
• pretending ignorance

The study also provides some reasons why colleagues indulge in knowledge hiding:

• they are distrustful of co-workers or management
• they feel an injustice has been done to them
• they are retaliating for someone else’s bad behavior
• their organizational culture encourages secrecy rather than sharing
• they believe that they can get away with it

In a similar vein, Ian Thorpe has noted in his KM on a dollar a day blog the following reasons why people won’t share information:

• the requested material is “rough and ready” — fine in the hands of the originator, but not safe in the hands of others
• it is a preliminary draft and has not been perfected
• the material was not intended for external consumption
• it may not conform to the public position of management or the organization
• it may be based on evidence or arguments that have not yet been properly vetted

So what are the best antidotes for knowledge hiding? The key is to build an organizational culture of knowledge sharing.  However, that is easier said than done.  In light of that, what do the study’s authors recommend?

The paper suggested that companies can overcome knowledge hiding by having more direct contact and less email communication with employees, highlighting examples of trustworthiness, and avoiding “betrayal” incentives, such as rewards for salespeople who poach another’s clients. (Jordan Press, Ottawa Citizen, May 16, 2011) [emphasis added]

In addition,

• Build trust — emphasize positive relationships among employees
• Demonstrate the mutual benefits that result when colleagues share information
• Treat all workers fairly and respectfully, thereby reducing feelings of injustice and the need for retaliation

At the end of the day, if you want to get value out of your expensive knowledge management systems, you have to spend the time and effort to ensure that all the people involved are willing to cooperate and share.  Don’t let a technology vendor tell you otherwise.

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For further reading, see: Jack Vinson, Knowledge hiding among co-workers.

[Photo Credit: Susan NYC]

Is your firm or law department still counting its pennies? Or is your firm or company so optimistic about its prospects that you’ve been given a large budget to spend freely on knowledge and information management projects?

The headlines in the legal technology press often feature impressive, state of the art, large-budget projects. However, what if you don’t have a large budget? What if your firm is maintaining a tight control on costs? How do you undertake effective KM and IM projects?

At this summer’s ILTA Conference, we’re hoping to provide practical advice and real life examples of law firms and law departments that have found frugal ways to meet ambitious KM/IM goals. To that end, we’re looking for legal technologists who have implemented successful and cost-effective KM/IM programs. Specifically, we’re looking for legal technologists who have done so using free or very inexpensive resources. Perhaps they have found helpful open source software. Perhaps they have found a way to partner with vendors, clients or business partners to reduce or share costs. Perhaps they have found ways to use standard law firm tools like Microsoft Office to improve their KM/IM activities. Perhaps they have taken basic steps like creating a firm-wide taxonomy or ensuring that information flows smoothly without unnecessary duplication of effort.

If you are a successful frugal innovator or know someone who is, please let me know.  We’d love to hear your stories and learn from your success.

[Photo Credit: smackfu]

In a world run by bean counters, knowledge managers sometimes fear that they will get short shrift if they cannot marshal the data necessary to impress the folks in green eyeshades. The problem is, of course, that it can be challenging to find compelling metrics to support the case for KM. In the context of law firm knowledge management, we often say that KM done well helps lawyers work more efficiently and effectively.  But has anyone at your firm produced recent data to support this proposition?

This comparative lack of data has always made me uncomfortable.  We may shrug and say that trying to prove KM ROI is a fool’s errand, but that doesn’t always dispel the lingering discomfort. Consequently, I was heartened to receive a reminder this week from a master of data, Dr. Hans Rosling, of the value and limitations of data. Dr. Rosling is famous for making data sing. If you want an impressive demonstration of his abilities, take a look at his four-minute video below: 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes - the Joy of Stats.  By any measure, it’s a tour de force. Unfortunately, it isn’t one I could reasonably replicate standing before the executive committee of my firm.

So what is to be done?

Draw inspiration from Dr. Rosling’s most recent TED Talk about the Magic Washing Machine.  In  his usual fashion, he presents a stunning array of data relating to global population, income distribution and energy consumption.  All of it is interesting, however, the statistical pyrotechnics are slightly depressing for a data-challenged knowledge manager like me.  But then suddenly, at the 7:50 minute mark, he explains the magic of washing machines and does so without a single data point. Rather, he relies on anecdote and illustration to make his point very powerfully. At the end of the presentation, I remembered his explanation of the magic, not the specifics of the  data he provided during the bulk of the presentation.

When making the case for KM, don’t ever underestimate the power of storytelling.  In truth, Dr. Rosling’s greatest strength is his ability to tell a compelling story.  That story may be grounded in data, but it’s the narrative line rather than the scientific detail that remains in your memory.  You don’t need to be statistician or magician to pull this off.  Rather, you just need to be able to recognize —  and tell — a good story.

200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - the Joy of Stats:

Dr. Hans Rosling and the Magic Washing Machine:

[Hat tip to Michael Mills of Neota Logic Inc. for sending me Hans Rosling's TED talk on the Magic Washing Machine.  Hat tip to Evangeline Warren and Mark Salamon for sending me Dr. Rosling's talk on the Joy of Stats.]

[Photo Credit:  Black Country Museums]

Forty years ago today, my parents packed up their children and every material possession they had to move to the other side of the world.  In retrospect, I can only marvel at the bravery involved in taking that step.  With that move they had to start all over again –  in a culture and climate that were very foreign to them, far from the comforts of family and home.

Since that time, I’ve moved to and lived in two other countries. The first one was to pursue an educational opportunity, the second one was to pursue an professional opportunity.  Unlike my parents, each of my moves involved countries that on paper shared a great deal.  Nonetheless, after each move I discovered that the local culture was quite different from the one I left.  As a result, I had to learn new ways of being and acting.  Most surprisingly, even though each of these countries was English-speaking, I soon found that I had to learn a distinctly new vocabulary and way of speaking in order to communicate.

When I made the move from client-facing lawyer to lawyer-facing knowledge manager, I found myself in yet another immigrant experience.  Suddenly I was faced with the need to analyze and understand the organizational culture around me in a new way so that I could maximize my effectiveness in my new role.  This involved an anthropological exercise that I return to often in  order to be aware of the changes in the culture around me.  Interestingly, even though I’ve been with the same organization for twenty years, I’ve found it very useful to keep the mindset of an immigrant in order to perceive cultural shifts as they occur.

Knowledge managers often find themselves in a particular organizational world, but not of that world.  While this can mean initial frustration as you struggle to learn the folkways of the organization’s culture, that distance can be hugely helpful when you try to understand objectively how the people around you work and succeed.  Learning to observe the signs, find and pull the cultural triggers, and, ultimately, shift the organization into a more knowledge-sharing culture are critical to a knowledge manager’s success.

Without a doubt, immigration is a challenging experience.  For knowledge managers, I’d argue that it is a necessary experience that helps develop a sense of inquiry and understanding.  So don’t get too comfortable — there’s too much to learn.

[Photo Credit: Craig James]

Does your firm invest in knowledge?  Does it have an effective knowledge development strategy? Or is it simply paying lip service to the notion of being in “the knowledge business”?  Even if you believe that your firm has a strong commitment to investing in its knowledge, I’d invite you to keep reading.

Yesterday I had the good fortune to receive from Oz Benamram an interesting Harvard Business School case study entitled, McKinsey & Company: Managing Knowledge and Learning.  The case study recounts McKinsey’s journey from 1926 to 1996, viewed through the lens of McKinsey’s growing understanding of the value of investing in the knowledge of the firm. McKinsey is famous for its emphasis on internal training and knowledge sharing.  In fact, Rajat Gupta (the managing director of the firm at the time the case study was written) has been quoted as saying that “knowledge is the lifeblood of McKinsey.” This case study gives us a glimpse of how much consistent effort has been required on the part of members of the firm at all levels to create and sustain this reputation for knowledge investment and excellence. The case study portrays a firm that seems to be seeking constantly to improve the ways in which it helps its people grow professionally. It’s also clearly committed to maintaining its position as a thought leader. In reading the study, I was struck by several things:

• When McKinsey created the position of full-time director of training, the person appointed to the position was one of the firm’s most senior and productive partners.  This sent a clear signal that the role was strategically important for the firm.
• Fred Gluck (another former managing director of the firm) strove to create a more stimulating intellectual environment within the firm.  Accordingly, he “set out to convert his partners to his strongly held beliefs—that knowledge development had to be a core, not a peripheral firm activity; that it needed to be ongoing and institutionalized, not temporary and project based; and that it had to be the responsibility of everyone, not just a few.”
• Professional development and knowledge management activities were natural outgrowths of each other:  “As the firm’s new emphasis on individual consultant training took hold and the Clientele Sectors and Centers of Competence began to generate new insights, many began to feel the need to capture and leverage the learning.”
• Even before McKinsey had a formal knowledge management effort, the firm tried to lower internal barriers to knowledge sharing.  One of their first efforts was to encourage consultants to prepare two-page briefings that could be distributed firmwide.  These practice bulletins were used to spread ideas and helped elevate within the firm the reputations of the authors of these briefings.
• McKinsey’s first formal KM project was  to develop a common database of knowledge gleaned from various client engagements and then developed within specific practice areas (the Practice Development Network).  Interestingly, they also undertook an informal project that initially proved to be much more popular than the electronic database:  a printed index of subject matter experts and core documents critical to each practice area (the Knowledge Resource Directory, aka the McKinsey Yellow Pages). While the case study does not state why this second effort was so popular, its rapid adoption might be due to the fact that the resource was concise, focused and highly portable.
• Their approach to KM changed as the firm better understood how it needed to use the knowledge it was trying to manage:  “By the early 1990s, too many people were seeing practice development as the creation of experts and the generation of documents in order to build our reputation. But knowledge is only valuable when it is between the ears of consultants and applied to clients’ problems.  Because it is less effectively developed through the disciplined work of a few than through the spontaneous interaction of many,  we had to change the more structured `discover-codify-disseminate‘ model to a looser and more inclusive `engage-explore-apply-share‘ approach.  In other words, we shifted our focus from developing knowledge to building individual and team capability.”
• KM is not just about size — a bigger database is not necessarily better.  The knowledge has to be managed for some useful purpose. At McKinsey, Fred Gluck “created a Client Impact Committee, and asked it to explore the ways in which the firm could ensure that the expertise it was developing created positive measurable results in each client engagement.”
• While there has been vigorous debate about the single best knowledge development strategy, Rajat Gupta was of the view that it was better to try a variety of methods rather than spending firm resources simply discussing the issue.  This has led to a continued significant investment in knowledge development.  According to Gupta,  “We have easily doubled our investment in knowledge over these past couple of years.  There are lots more people involved in many more initiatives.  If that means we do 5-10% less client work today, we are willing to pay that price to invest in the future.  Since Marvin Bower, every leadership group has had a commitment to leave the firm stronger than it found it.  It’s a fundamental value of McKinsey to invest for the future of the firm.”

[emphasis added]

So now that you’ve learned a bit more about McKinsey’s efforts, let me ask if your firm’s commitment to knowledge and learning is comparable to that of McKinsey?  If not, why not?

[Photo Credit: Nilram]

Some advice to the lovelorn I read many years ago suggested that the best way for a young woman to reel in a young man was to ask him lots of questions about his favorite topic — himself.  From the vantage point of the 21st century, there are any number of objections one might raise regarding the assumptions underlying that advice, but even so there is something there that I’d like to explore further in the context of law firm knowledge management. Namely, the connection between conversation and relationship.

The best law firm knowledge managers build relationships with their lawyer and non-lawyer colleagues that develop over time into something rich and productive, yielding mutual benefits and, often, benefits for their firm.  This means relationships that involve good communication, cooperation and collaboration.  And, it all begins with good conversation.  However, a law firm isn’t always the easiest place in which to hold a conversation. In an environment conditioned by hourly billing, we all tend to be extraordinarily time sensitive.  As a result, our electronic and in person exchanges are often rather transactional – designed to achieve a limited (usually urgent) business purpose.  This can make it difficult to initiate and sustain conversations that don’t necessarily have a direct bearing on immediate client needs.  Yet, it is precisely the conversations with a perspective that reaches beyond the urgent and immediate that can have the greatest beneficial impact on client and firm.  Equally, sometimes a quick conversation held as you pass each other in the hall can surface key facts that shed new light on an old problem or help move a project forward.  Not every conversation needs to be heavy, but knowledge managers should work hard to ensure that every conversation is meaningful.  In other words, they should focus on conversations that count.

So what are the hallmarks of conversations that count?  Here are some suggestions:

• They are smarter conversations: They  focus on something that matters. As Hugh MacLeod has noted, taking a leadership position on something that matters is critical to success.  So why waste your time and talk on the ephemeral or the immaterial?  Make a commitment to yourself to hold smarter conversations.
• They enable a two-way exchange: They don’t follow a social script — “Hi, how are you?” “Fine.” <end of conversation>.  They are not data dumps.  Rather, they provide and elicit useful information.
• They move understanding forward: They are powerful tools for learning.  (And this means learning more in a conversation than the sad fact that your interlocutor is a self-referent bore.)
• They are strategic: Jo Haraf has written on how to use conversations strategically to discover unmet needs.  She provides a guide to structuring these conversations so that they yield tangible results.  Best of all, if your conversations are strategic (and well-executed), they often leave the door open to another conversation.  In other words, doing this right allows you to do it again.
• They are not self-referent. They are not focused exclusively on … YOU.  Enough said.

To be clear, this post is ABSOLUTELY NOT advocating more meetings.  In fact, meetings are sometimes inhospitable environments for meaningful conversation.  This post is advocating a focus on smarter conversations — conversations about things that matter, conversations that help build productive relationships. In fact, these are the relationships that make your work as a knowledge manager possible AND enjoyable.  So make your conversations count.

[Hat tip to Greg Lambert for reminding me to revisit Hugh MacLeod's blog.]

[Photo Credit: Hugh MacLeod]

Hello everybody!
Look at yourself.  Now back to me.
Now back at yourself.  Now back to me.
Sadly… you are not a Monster.

[A MONSTER????!!!]

Those are the words of Sesame Street’s engaging blue monster, Grover, spoken in a clever twist on the now-famous Old Spice Man television commercial. (See below) These videos show examples of an eye-catching monster (or man, as the case may be) and then ask you to contrast your humdrum existence (or man) with what might be if you were a bit more blue or he were a bit more studly.

In each case, you are invited to indulge in that all too human tendency to compare your situation to that of another. In the face of such monster (or masculine) superiority, is it any wonder that we find ourselves believing that the grass is in fact greener on the other side?

Lately, law firm knowledge managers have been comparing themselves to project managers, alternative fee wizards and marketing mavens.  This exercise has left many feeling just a little inadequate and a touch insecure.  Nonetheless, the answer to that uncomfortable feeling is not to jump on the nearest bandwagon.  Rather, it is to think more strategically about the value you bring to your organization. Focus on your core competencies.  What do you do better than anyone else? Then think about which of your abilities and activities provide high impact with relatively little effort. If you need some help sorting your high-value activities from the low-value ones, follow the advice of Oz Benamram and try placing all your activities on an Effort-Impact Grid. Done correctly, this will help you improve your ability to deliver value to and have an impact on your organization.

You may not be a blue monster, but with this information in hand you should understand better how to be exactly what your firm needs.