Rees Morrison reports

I would respectfully suggest that there may be a better, less contentious approach. If we can agree that general counsel and their outside lawyers understand that there is great value in knowledge sharing and that we are all invested in promoting this sharing, then we should work to find a more efficient and cost-effective means of knowledge sharing rather than making the sharing financially difficult for the outside lawyers.  Instead of old-fashioned meetings, could we perhaps try … Enterprise 2.0?

The promise of Enterprise 2.0 is that it offers low-cost, light-weight ways of creating information streams so that participants can share their knowledge as and when needed.  This has the added benefit of eliminating some unnecessary meetings and emails – especially those regarding status updates.  Of course, there is no substitute for face-to-face meetings and sometimes meeting in person is the best and most efficient thing to do.  But for those other times, we should consider taking advantage of current technology to maximize knowledge sharing while minimizing the financial impact on clients and firms alike.

[Photo Credit: ryancr]

Here’s the request from ILTA:

The KM Peer Group is conducting its biennial knowledge management survey to probe the trends, hot topics and development of KM in the legal industry. Results of the survey will be published in the KM White Paper scheduled for publication in June.  Please take five to ten minutes to complete the survey or forward it to the appropriate KM person in your organization (we only want one response per organization). As an incentive to participate, we will draw three names from our pool of respondents –– two winners will receive $500, and a third will receive his/her choice of $500 or a waived registration fee for ILTA 2010, the annual conference (a $1,025 value).

And, here’s the link to the survey, which will remain open until March 26:  www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22ABG2QSZN4,

ILTA requests that you submit only one response per firm.  Thank you for participating and Good Luck!

The stone — as big as a chicken egg and weighing just over 100 grams (3.53 ounces) — was estimated as among the world’s top 20 high-quality rough diamonds. It was discovered in September at South Africa’s Cullinan mine.

What would someone pay for the potential embodied by your team?  If not a record-setting price, why not?  Thanks to the economic downturn, there is some terrific talent on the market looking for new opportunities. Perhaps it’s time to reassess and augment the strength of your bench.

And let’s not forget that the key to a rough diamond is a masterful diamond cutter.  Your ability to prioritize and shape the efforts of your team will go a long way to realizing their brilliance.  Do you have the skill to reveal the myriad glittering facets hidden in the rough diamonds of your team?  If not, what are you doing about that?  It may be past time for you to polish your skills.

[Photo Credit:  Times Live]

Some have reported that in their view the safest course through the economic downturn was to pursue tactical goals rather than grand visions.  They have taken comfort in the sense of forward motion generated by their incremental gains.  However, while achieving these goals can be satisfying (in the way that crossing something off a to do list can be satisfying), they too rarely provide the competitive advantage that our firms are looking for.

What works better?  Pursuing a BHAG: a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.  Jim Collins and Jerry Porras coined this phrase to capture the kind of grand vision that a company articulates and then uses as an organizing principle and a spur to greater action.  Google doesn’t just want to be the go to search engine. Google’s BHAG is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”  Amazon doesn’t just want to be a great bookstore.  Rather, Amazon’s BHAG is a little grander than that:  “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company for three primary customer sets — consumer customers, seller customers and developer customers.”  That’s all?

What audacious, outrageous goal are you trying to achieve with knowledge management?  Is it big enough to keep you and your team energized and focused?  As we emerge from the economic downturn, bold ideas are going to help the surviving firms thrive.  What’s your bold idea?

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Here are some additional resources on BHAGs:

• Jim Collins, Good to Great
• Jim Collins, How Can You Tell if You Have a Good BHAG? [video]
• Alyssa Gregory, What’s Your BHAG? How to Create a Big Hairy Audacious Goal

[Photo Credit: jiruan]

Knowledge managers have their own skills and tricks. And some of us are extremely good at what we do in normal office settings. But have you considered what might happen if you changed venue or context? What skills would be portable? What new tricks would you have to learn?  What new audiences or clients could you reach?

I’m not suggesting that you become an acrobat on a subway train. Rather, I’ve told the story to help you initiate a thought experiment. It’s in experiments like this that we discover new opportunities for innovation and growth — and, perhaps, a chance to brush-up some old tumbling skills.

[Photo Credit:  Florriebassingbourn]

While it may seem casual to some, I’ve discovered that blogging requires a fair amount of time and thought.  Over the last two years, I’ve blogged in the early morning and very late at night.  In addition, I’ve had to set aside time to do the reading that makes it possible for me to write.  And then, there’s the thinking time.  While I’m not always successful, I do try to process information before committing it to writing.  While there are many helpful blogs that focus on being primarily a conduit to the work of others, I’ve tried to balance some original writing with simply sharing information with my readers.  Lately I haven’t had the time to do any of this so you and I haven’t had these posts.

What I’ve learned through this forced hiatus is that I miss the stimulation and discipline of regular blogging. Above all, I’ve missed having opportunities to be in conversation with you.

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder.  In my case, at least, I can say that’s true.  I do hope it’s true for you as well.

[Photo Credit:  YivaS]

If you look around, you’ll see some of the same issues with respect to Enterprise 2.0 and social media generally.  There’s lots of concern about how to evaluate its efficacy.  And even more concern about how to regulate it.  Some companies have clamped down on their employees, while others have taken a more moderate approach, presumably emboldened by the potential they see in these new communications channels.  Whatever mode your company’s in, take heart from the fact that we’ve seen this pattern of behavior before.  If you doubt it, watch the  5 1/2 minute video below entitled “Card-Carrying Capitalist Supports Nationalization” provided courtesy of The Wall Street Journal Online.  In this video, author Matthew Bishop explains why he thinks bank nationalization can be a good thing.  While I’m not in any way endorsing or criticizing his point of view, I was interested in his suggestion (about 2.5 minutes into the video) that bubbles follow innovation.  And, because it’s hard to understand properly what’s really going on in a period of great innovation, it’s easy for abuse to occur during that bubble.  However, companies that can find some sound operating principles that take advantage of the innovation will be able to ride out the bubble and emerge in a stronger position.  The role of social media evangelists is to help companies find that oasis of calm and sanity amid the hype and frenetic activity surrounding web 2.0 tools so they are well-positioned to thrive after the bubble bursts.

So when you hear people deriding social media and Enterprise 2.0, remember that they are viewing these new communications channels through their old bricks-and-mortar lens.  They will catch up with the rest of us once their vision has been corrected.

[Photo Credit:  h. koppdelaney]

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

Translated into the world of KM, this suggests that successful knowledge managers are plugged into their organizations and notice changes, looking constantly for opportunities.  Their experience helps them trust their intuition – which is the great gift that experts have in abundance.  Their orientation towards opportunity is, by definition, positive and helps them focus on the good that can be achieved.  Finally, they understand the value in learning from each experience.  Prior failures and successes remind them that they can trust themselves to make some good out of even difficult results.

Those of us who do not feel so lucky should not despair.  According to Richard Wiseman, we can learn to be lucky by using the following techniques:

• Listen to your hunches.  Don’t focus solely on the “rational side of the situation.”  Pay attention to how you feel about a decision.  Your “gut feelings act as an alarm bell – a reason to consider a decision carefully.”

• Break out of your routine. “Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties.”  Wiseman contrasts them with lucky people who seek out variety, thereby increasing the likelihood of “chance opportunities.”

• Accentuate the positive. “Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse.” Take the example of one positive thinker who had fallen down a flight of stairs and broken his leg.   When Wiseman “asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.”

What will you do today to change your luck?

[Photo Credit:  Kelley Mari]

According to Steve Barth, there’s a significant upside to focusing on the individual knowledge worker:

It seems obvious, but it is not often said that knowledge management works best when knowledge workers take the initiative and responsibility for what they know, don’t know and need to know. Doing so not only makes the individual more valuable to the corporation, it also enhances the value of intellectual capital for the corporation.

Tempted?

Here’s the plan:  learn about personal knowledge management (or personal sensemaking, if that is an easier concept for you).   Think about what it takes to aggregate, filter and share content effectively.  Put these principles into practice for yourself and measure their impact on your work life.  And then think about how you could pass on this learning to every one of your colleagues.  Taking this grassroots approach, could you help each of your colleagues become so good at managing their information flows that their work processes and work product improve?  Could you find a way to improve the overall performance of your organization?

If you’re interested in learning more about personal KM/ personal sensemaking, please participate in the Twitter Chat on Personal Knowledge Management sponsored by KMers.org.  In addition, here are some other good introductions to the subject:

• KM 0.0 – Simply Enabling Trusted Context-Rich Conversations Among Communities That Care (Dave Pollard)
• Managing the Fire Hose (Mary Abraham)
• Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) – An Update (Dave Pollard)
• Personal Toolkit: Three thousand communities of practice (Steve Barth)
• PKM: Aggregate, Filter, Connect (Harold Jarche)
• Resources in Personal KM (Steve Barth)
• Sense-Making with PKM (Harold Jarche)
• The Power of One (Steve Barth)
• The Third KM:  Personal Knowledge Management (Patti Anklam)
• What’s Next After Knowledge Management?  A Scenario (Dave Pollard)
• Your say: Personal knowledge management (Sandra Higgison)

[Photo Credit: moeyknight]

Elan Gil has given this some thought and provided a list of characteristics he thinks are important, as he reports in Hiring the First 5 Engineers – What Sort of People Do You Want on Your Team:

1. Do what it takes-edness (to coin a term). Willingness to dive in and fix any problems that come up and to take charge since there will not be anyone else to do so. This includes the willingness to do lots of grunt work – there is no one to delegate to.
2. Persistence/tenacity.
3. Ability to deal with uncertainty and not freak out. You may end up with multiple pivots depending on company stage. You need people who will stay calm and keep with it.
4. Generalist technical knowledge. You will not have a “front end team” an “ops team” a “backend team” and a “database team” etc. You need someone who can optimally work on all parts of the stack.
5. Not religious about technology (or anything really). This is useful at any size company, but at a startup you really don’t want to waste time debating the merits of Python versus Java. You just want to build stuff and get it done. No engineering ego (I find the most confident engineers often don’t need to reinforce their ego – they already know they are very good so dont feel threatened easily) and no drama.
6. Get a lot done. You need people who can just crank on product. They need to be able to problem solve independently and go figure stuff out.
7. Do “just enough”. Focus on the 80% of stuff that needs to get done, not the 20% edge case which most users won’t care about (i.e. hire people who buil things that are very solid, but not “perfect” – this applies to an internet company, not e.g. a later stage hardware co)
8. Get along with the team. This does not mean the person is not quirky or lacks personality. It does mean that you will be 5-10 people in a room every day and you need people you and the rest of the team get along with.
9. Bonus points: financial stability. This could be a low personal burn rate, or ability to take a low salary either through a past financial success, being straight out of school so living costs low, or other means. This means the person may be more willing to take a low salary in exchange for more equity, which helps the company survive longer on less.
10. Lots of other stuff, but I think the above is important.

He goes on to suggest that while there is no perfect way of ensuring that the person you’re interviewing has what it takes, you can gather important information through reference checks, taking them out for a beer or dinner to see how they fit culturally with the team, and hiring them for a day and giving them a problem to solve.  The important thing is to keep digging until you’ve got a good sense as to whether this person meets your criteria.

This list of key traits applies to a knowledge management dream team as well.  KM is a cost center with few traditional means of proving ROI.  As a result, the KM group will most likely be small and will have to operate with the energy, enthusiasm and tenacity of a classic start-up.  If you’re managing a group like that, you’d do well to hire the sorts of people Elan Gil recommends.  And, don’t forget the beer!

[Photo Credit:  Roscoe Van Damme]