We're two-thirds of the way through the eating marathon composed of Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year's Eve. And, as surely as night follows day, many of us are considering our expanding waistlines and the necessity of a diet in the New Year. Just as predictably, many of us will fail in our quest to change... Continue Reading →
Another Reason to Resist Change
In a recent post in the Forrester blog, Tim Walters discusses some of the reasons why IT (and knowledge management) folks cling to their top-down one-size-fits-all approach and resist the drive to enable personalization of their offerings. He clearly finds this frustrating since, in his view, personalization is now a matter of "Thurvival".** Unfortunately, the... Continue Reading →
Finding Effective Incentives for Collaboration and Contribution of Content
What can law firm knowledge management learn from the war on terror?Fred Burton, former deputy chief of the counterterrorism division of the U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and author of Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent, told Leonard Lopate in a recent public radio interview that counterterrorism experts have a proven set of tools... Continue Reading →
Change is Good…You Go First
Change is Good ... You Go First.That's a great line -- worthy of a great philosopher* (e.g., Dilbert or Garfield or Calvin & Hobbes). And it speaks to a fundamental of human nature. While we objectively may understand that a proposed change will be beneficial, we intuitively resist change. Whether it's because it takes a... Continue Reading →
Generation Y versus Big Law
I can't wait until Generation Y lawyers start flooding through the doors of big law firms. We're told that just about everything about Gen Y runs counter to the work ethic and environment of these firms. So a showdown is inevitable. It will be very interesting to see which force prevails. Gen Y is often... Continue Reading →
Best Practice vs Next Practice
Mark Gould's comment on my previous post (Not Quite) Best Practices pointed me to Derek Wenmoth's blog post on Best Practice vs Next Practice. Derek makes the interesting observation that while best practice is a snapshot of what we know has worked well in the past, next practice is an attempt to take that prior... Continue Reading →
When Change Seems Impossible
Marshall Goldsmith, the noted consultant and leadership coach, gets right to the point in his Harvard Business blog post When People Don't Want to Change: Your job is to help people achieve positive, lasting change in behavior. How do you deal with people who have no desire to change? I don’t! Have you ever tried... Continue Reading →
What Went Right?
My last post rather morbidly focused on using KM Autopsies as a useful way of figuring out what went wrong with knowledge management projects. Sometimes, however, it's much more effective to ask "What went right?"This apparently contrarian advice is rooted in the field of Appreciative Inquiry, which starts from the perspective that it's ultimately more... Continue Reading →
Getting Real About Law Firm Knowledge Management
In a recent post I discussed a 2007 study of the impact of knowledge management on the ability of Bolivian farmers to innovate and to support lasting change. The beauty of the cases studied is that the issues involved aren't merely theoretical. If the farmers don't get it right, they won't grow enough to live,... Continue Reading →
Bolivian Farmers: A KM Case Study
What can a Wall Street law firm learn from Bolivian farmers practicing semi-subsistence farming methods? A lot with respect to using knowledge management to foster innovation and make lasting changes.In the case of these farmers, innovation was enhanced greatly when (i) knowledge management was the joint effort of multiple actors, including development agencies that provide... Continue Reading →
Above and Beyond KM 