Tim Leberecht's post, The Writing Organization: Knowledge Management Made Easy, literally took my breath away this morning. I loved the idea. And then wondered if I or any of my KM colleagues in other law firms would have the audacity to propose it to our respective firms.Here's his suggestion:Make it mandatory for every employee to... Continue Reading →
Is Your Knowledge Management Strategic?
In honor of Canada Day, here's a Canadian perspective on developing a knowledge strategy. Courtesy of Knowledge Flow, we have an article published by the Queen's University School of Business entitled Creating a Knowledge Strategy for your Organization: A Special KM Forum Report.This article provides a useful overview of knowledge management. For example it begins... Continue Reading →
Knowledge Management Requires Interesting Conversations
Robert Scoble summed up his current approach to life in the following words:The real thing I’ve been doing for more than eight years now is to try to arrange my life so that I have an interesting conversation every day with someone interesting.Reading this led to an "Aha" moment for me. I shifted from the... Continue Reading →
Building a Great Knowledge Management Team
When hiring we sometimes focus too much on the individual, and not enough on how they will fit in with the existing staff. An extreme version of this is to hunt and low for a "star." Each us of may define "star" slightly differently depending on the context. For example, in the law firm context,... Continue Reading →
Failing by Default
J.K. Rowling, creator of Harry Potter, is a great proponent of failure. In fact, she entitled her recent commencement address at Harvard "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination." Her experience has taught her that it is through failure that we strip away the inessential, discover what we truly value in life,... Continue Reading →
Envious of ROI
A newly-published article on knowledge management began with the following example to illustrate why organizations should even bother with a KM program:Siemens, the global telecommunications giant, recently won a $460,000 contract in Switzerland to build a telecommunications network for two hospitals in spite of the fact that its bid was 30% higher than the competition.... Continue Reading →
Have You Contributed Enough to Retire?
My last post talked about the dangers of letting baby boomers slip out the door without first ensuring that they had left in their firm's KM system "knowledge nuggets" containing their accumulated experience and learning. That post was intended to be a warning to knowledge managers. But perhaps we should launch a parallel appeal to... Continue Reading →
Forget Gen Y! Focus on the Disappearing Boomers.
While we've been whipping ourselves into a frenzy over the possible (but as of yet undefined) impact of Generation Y on our comfortable ways of doing things, we've been disregarding the real crisis occurring right under our noses. Valuable knowledge is walking out the door with every retiring baby boomer. Dr. Jay Liebowitz has been... Continue Reading →
Enterprise 2.0 Meets Reality
Doug Cornelius is one of the lucky ones who is attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. Luckily for the rest of us, Doug has been liveblogging from the conference. Yesterday Doug reported on a panel focused on how and why the grand vision of Enterprise 2.0 hasn't taken hold in corporate America. In his... Continue Reading →
Serenity and the Knowledge Manager
Around the time of WWII, US theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a prayer that has become known as the "Serenity Prayer":God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.According to the Wikipedia... Continue Reading →
Above and Beyond KM 