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 →
Working with the Smartest Lawyers in the World
Where do the smartest lawyers in the world work? If Seth Godin is to be believed, each law firm knowledge manager could say "the smartest lawyers in the world work at my firm." In his post, All customers are smarter than average, he reports that people regularly rate themselves as "less racist than average, smarter... 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 →
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 →
Gen Y’s Delayed Impact on Big Law
My post last week on Generation Y versus Big Law and its impact on law firm knowledge management generated a great deal of traffic and some interesting discussion. Among the commentators was Anna Ivey, who is an expert in law school admissions. In her post Gen Y, Meet Big Law, she suggested that Gen Y... 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 →
The Power of Saying Thank You
Yesterday a colleague asked me to help him locate a particular sort of precedent that was not all that common. When I asked him about his time frame, his reply was "the usual." (Based on prior experience, I knew that the best translation for that was "yesterday.") After quickly reorganizing my schedule, I turned to... 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 →
Above and Beyond KM 