Fortunes have been made in the food industry through the development and use of "secret" sauces. These are the seemingly-magic ingredients that chefs use to elevate a simple food item into a must have (or must eat).Knowledge management has a secret sauce -- it's trust. Trust is the magic ingredient that reliably increases user participation.... Continue Reading →
Collaboration and Equity
In his recent discussion of Charles Heckscher's book, The Collaborative Enterprise, Larry Prusak notes that while collaboration may be the latest buzzword (with all the attendant shallow writing and commentary that regularly accompanies business fads), Hecksher's book is a material improvement over most of the other available analysis of collaboration. One striking observation is reported... Continue Reading →
Setting Limits on Collaboration
Collaboration is the business buzzword* du jour. As with any other fad, it's tempting for business leaders to say that everything they do is collaboration. Resist this temptation. As aptly pointed out in a recent Economist Intelligence Unit report and discussed in this Wikinomics post, if we define collaboration so broadly as to cover virtually... Continue Reading →
Collaboration and the Golden Rule
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is the "Golden Rule" and it may be a key to collaboration.If the basic sense of fairness underlying the Golden Rule set the terms of collaboration within an organization, it might in fact be possible for otherwise competitive co-workers to begin to collaborate.... Continue Reading →
Personality and Law Firm Knowledge Management
In the hype about web 2.0 and social networking, you'd be forgiven for thinking that all you needed to do was purchase the perfect silver bullet (i.e., whatever technology the vendor of the day is hawking) and your organization would be transformed into a hip, reflexively-collaborative, effortless knowledge sharing, 21st century knowledge management heaven.But what... Continue Reading →
Collaborating for Fun or Work or Both?
In his post, The Muddle in the Collaboration Middle, Tom Davenport sets out what he views as the two viable uses for collaboration and collaborative technologies in the workplace: * Fun -- collaboration for purely social purposes * Work -- collaboration for narrowly-defined business purposesHe goes on to say that businesses fail when they try... Continue Reading →
Building a Collaborative Workplace
Shawn Callahan, Mark Schenk and Nancy White have just published an Anecdote Whitepaper entitled Building a Collaborative Workplace. They summarize their whitepaper as follows:This paper has three parts. We start by briefly exploring what we mean by collaboration and why organisations and individuals should build their collaboration capability. Then, based on that understanding, we lay... Continue Reading →
How Collaborative is Your Organization?
Shawn Callahan at Anecdote has posted a thought-provoking quick quiz to help you determine how collaborative your organization really is. Once you tally your results, you'll find out whether you work in "collaboration nirvana" or "collaboration hell."For those who would like to move out of collaboration hell and closer to collaboration nirvana, take a cold,... Continue Reading →
Creating a Culture of Collaboration
Collaboration is all the rage. Proponents of web 2.0 tell us that it's just the way we work naturally. However, for far too many years corporate culture has often emphasized the benefits of individual achievement and competition over collaborative efforts. This suggests that some folks are going to have to be retrained before they can... Continue Reading →
Above and Beyond KM 