Reinvent Australia: how can we shape a positive future for nations?

A few days ago I attended the launch event of Reinvent Australia, organized by Annalie Killian of Amplify Festival at PwC’s Sydney offices. It was a very interesting event, digging into the issues of how we can bring together many people’s ideas to create better futures for nations. Graham Kenny, President of Reinvent Australia, described

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On creativity - a Singapore perspective

On a recent visit to Singapore I was browsing the Sunday papers and came upon this quote from Ngiam Tong Dow, who was closely involved in the development of the dynamic Singaporean economy for 40 years.

One quote stood out on creativity that I wanted to save and share.
"When a Chinese boy goes home after school, his mother asks him 'What did you learn from your teacher today?'
But when an American boy goes home after school his mother asks ' How many questions did you ask your teacher today'

He goes on to say ' Which boy do you think will grow up to be more creative? I think that in the contest for intellectual hegemony the Americans will win. Because the Chinese (tend) to think within the box. The American's are more open, they are encourage to think outside the box."

It is a bit broad brush and stereotypical, but I was reminded of that old quote that if you keep doing what you always have done you shouldn't be surprised that you get the same or worse results. The technology and the speed of its impact mean that the old dogmas of the quiet past are probably inefficient today.

30 years ago when I started work £1 million of output was produced by 100 people but today it can be delivered by 50 people. also the life of skills effectiveness is also being cut

So the only way to grow is by skilling up and constantly reviewing and improving our skills base, but also to improve creativity and innovation to enable organisations to not only merely to survive but also to grow in the world of increased competition.

iPhone - a 3rd revolution?

Now that it is one week since all the hoopla of the WWDC and the launch of the iPhone Version 2, I've been reflecting on this and also thinking whether this is the time for me to switch.

The new iPhone answers some of the questions that I had in terms of allowing 3 G and GPS and also for its future if it is going to really tackle the corporate market - dealing with CIO's queries about working with their systems.

The main point was the price point - numerous bloggers felt that iPhone 1 was really aimed at the first adopters and the price in the UK of £100 for the 8GB version is within peoples pain threshold especially as in the European market - most phones are free and subsidised by the supplier.

The main thing was that although some of Apple's work in this area is a slight sense of catch up technologically - what no one does better than Apple is in ist very high standards in terms of design (the wow factor) and more crucially the ease of use for people. Talking to users of the iPhone 1 they said that even with it's limited offering they found it easy to use a significant number of the functions as well as the music (remember this doubles as an iPod also).

A number of commentators highlighted that Steve Jobs looked unwell (even though he is 53 - he did have surgery 4 years ago for pancreatic cancer). He also delegated a lot more of the key note to other speakers than he has in the past.

Maybe the iPhone is Steve Jobs 3rd revolution in the field of technology in terms of computers. He 1st did this in 1984 with the original Macintosh by utilising the GUI we all use today. Then the 2nd revolution was the developmenht of the iPod and iTunes and now the iPhone with it's attendant app Store which makes it into a handheld computer with software.

Apple have always tried to make using the technology not only a triumph of design but also an easy to use for those of us who aren't computer geeks.

Simplicity uber alles would summarise the Apple technology for me and why I will continue to use it.

If the iPhone is to Steve Jobs last major contribution to consumer technology, then what a way to bow out - most of us never have the opportunity to be revolutionary - he may have achieved three revolutions in his career in consumer technology and interestingly bought them closer to what Bill Gates wanted in terms of a computer on everyones desk. Jobs may have liberated that to one in everyones hand.

Keynote Speech from WWDC - announcing iPhone

Here is the link to the keynote speech at WWDC from last night. First reaction looks promising to the new version - presses most peoples buttons, though a few would want a better camera and the ability to MMS - though I think the second will be answered via App store - anyway enjoy the performance. Note also how Jobs crafts his message and does his presentations - very simple but very effective.

(PS - this will also be on iTunes as a vodcast - so that you can download)

Brad Bird talks on Innovation

One of my favourite movies is the Incredibles - I think the animation and the dialogue are absolutely brilliant and also Pixar is owned by a certain Steve Jobs.

Interestingly there is a McKinsey article out today interviewing the director Brad Bird who has two Oscars - one for the I's and the other for Ratatouille( which wasn't too scruffy either)

He highlights that innovation can come from unexpected places - the Internet came out of the Defence Department originally to set up a communications network that would survive a nuclear attack.

Bird was hired because the owners feared that they were getting complacent after a run of success and hired him to 'shake things up' The owners including Jobs said that he could expect robust discussion but that if he could convince them, they would change the way they did things.

When they were talking about the I's people said that to do this would take ten years and $500 million to do.

He set out to look for the frustrated artists - the people who nobody was listening to because the company was doing well. He listened to these 'black sheep' and gave them the opportunity to run with their ideas and basically slashed the I's production time at a lesser cost.

He was asked whether black sheep make better innovators. Bird says he is looking for involved and engaged people, and they can range from being quiet to very loud and evangelical. A common thread was that they have a restless probing nature and want to get to the problem.

Team dynamic s are also important especially if you have cross functional ones and the managers job is be creative in a harmonious way - imagine a symphony orchestra.

The important thing is to allow people to put their head above the parapet without getting it shot off. If you are the sort of manager who jumps all over people when they disagree then you are not going to get innovation. Once people know that it is OK to challenge their managers thoughts because they have a better idea - then their learning curve in Bird's opinion goes up. Up to a point Lord Copper - at the end of the day, the manager can't abdicate responsibility to the team - he still has to be convinced.

Morale of the team is also important - he reckons that bad morale means that for every $1 you spend then you get 25c of value Vice versa - he thinks it is $1 spent = $3 value. He thinks that companies don't always pay as much attention to morale as they should. He had worked on a number of disaster projects and noted that these were where people didn't feel invested in their work and any efforts to bring up problems were rebuffed.

The interviewers ask him apart from engagement and morale what is important

He says 'The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. Going back to the complacent company scenario at Pixar. He challenged them and said that this company was founded on doing stuff that was too ambitious. He states in the article " You guys have had nothing but success. What do you do with it? You don't play it safe - you do something that scares you, that's at the edge of your capabilities where you might fail. That's what gets you up in the morning.

I particularly liked that quote as it was the thrust of what Frank Dick said at a talk I attended earlier this week. He referred to the fact that we are at our best working in areas of white water turbulence not calm seas.

One area that he mentions is the presence of a creative culture - and I think that the interesting comment is the creation of a big atrium area which is a central meeting area. However Steve Jobs put the cafeteria, post rooms ,meeting rooms and the bathrooms in the centre. Jobs realised what any good knowledge manager would tell him that when people meet with one another either by design or by serendipity then things happen - social networks are formed and you meet people who might help you make an introduction to a person who might help you.

Interestingly they have a Pixar University (which seems like something that Rover did - but was also used at Walt Disney). I've always believed that learning doesn't stop after university and that learning is life long. However as we grow older with additional responsibilities it does get more difficult and we can lose the ability to learn new things or undertake new challenges.

For me I'd like to learn more about how to do a movie and edit and post it on the Internet or even internally. Some people might want to learn about graphics. Like bird I believe that we have to learn things that are outside our own area makes us a more complete person and also gives them the confidence to move to learn in other areas.

He also challenges leaders to be subversives and occasionally to have a person who is not a yes man but challenges your way of thinking.

He also recognises that innovation can be undermined and it was nice to see my old friend the passive aggressive organisation getting a good run out again.

Bird doesn't like people who in public or in a management meeting are supportive but once they get back into the safety of their department peck away at the proposal. He soon gets rid of these people as soon as he spots them.

It is recognised that leaders can inhibit innovation and he goes back to his earlier point on complacency - he strongly believes that you should never be satisfied and that you should have the attitude of a student of your craft and keep working to improve.

The human condition I believe demands that we look to climb mountains instead of climbing into valleys. Only by climbing those mountains can we see new horizons, live on the edge and truly be human.

Occasionally we need to help pick our colleagues up if they have fallen over and coach them to climb this mountain but in time give them the confidence to climb their own mountains and to teach others the same knowledge.

The first owner at Coke once said that the world belongs to the discontented - Brad Bird seems to have picked up the same baton and is running with it.

Rail Crisis on the Horizon??

An interesting article from the Adam Smith Institute posted today - that I've just captured for review later. You can read it here It would be interesting to read what experienced rail people have to say. It is interesting to read Dr B'Ching's columns in Private Eye on a weekly basis as well as other articles in Rail Magazines and blogs by Christian Wolmar to come to the conclusion that something is dysfunctional in the British Rail Industry.

Is the Adam Smith idea the way forward for the British Rail Industry or have we been witnessing re-nationalisation by stealth and that a second full re-privatisation is needed. I note that the ASI are holding a conference in early May so maybe this post is the start of a precursor to that. I'll be sure to post any blog posts on this conference into this area for others to pick up on.

Our Nomadic future

An interesting piece in about the rise of mobility with wireless communication. The article I'd like to read and reflect on and post a note next week, but it will be interesting to read how wireless technology will impact not only on our work places, but how it might impact on cities, work patterns and the way that we design our offices of the future.  Would I like to be a permanently on nomad with the freedom to roam but also recognising that it will be easier for people to watch me though Twitter, Facebook Second Life etc etc.

The business value of Twitter

On occasions I like to go over to CIO to see what Chief Information officers are talking about. Well following my recent posting on Twitter I have been interested in whether organisations will find a use for Twitter - any way here is an article by Abbie Lundberg that could act as a starting point for discussion. I have also seen comments from other bloggers on this point so - obviously it is a technology that may come into the work place and have a role though at present I want to consider it further.

I use Twitter and might try to find fellow like minds to try it out as an experiment to see where it leads. for example I saw it being used very effectively to monitor the progress of the Olympic torch through San Francisco this week and can imagine it being used especially useful with selected groups of people in a global setting.

Innovation Insights - blast from the past.

Over the weekend I was reading an article with Bill Campbell, who runs Intuit but prior to that was involved with Apple.

Two interviewers spoke to him recently for his thoughts on Innovation and as I’m on a bit of a roll here as I’m talking in a few weeks time on knowledge management and innovation in London so some additional quotes might be useful - but also it does chime in with what I’m talking about. Although the thrust of his discussion relates to Engineers some of his comments would cross boundaries. Quite a lot of his thoughts are already reflected in some of the work that I am looking to carry out in this firm.

With regard to innovation, he feels that it is important to provide people with time to work on things of their choosing that may be breakthrough thoughts that can replenish your business core. (I’ll be writing about core businesses another time.) These projects are then reviewed and evaluated and have the opportunity to become a mainstream product.

He acts iike a venture capitalist would act and wants people to come up with a basic business plan in terms of who is the product for, what do you think the market is likely to be. What will this do and how much of peoples behaviours will have to change. Effectively Campbell is operating what is known as a Schello screen with a Real/Win/Worth it bias - I have more details of this if people are interested.

He feels that it is important to give the’ crazy guys some stature and importance. He feels that if you start from that you have a better chance of maintaining a cutlture of innovation.

He also feels that it is important for a CEO to meet with people and have an open forum where people could highlight what was making life difficult for them with regasrd to their work or what they were struggling with and how projects that might be being balked could be bought forward. The important thing is that the innovation should be looking to solve the problems that consumers/clients want.

Campbell then goes out of his way to say that he is not an innovator - he sees his role as CEO to ensure that the right people are in the room and that the crazies have an opportunity to contribute. He sees empowered people having the opportunity to contribute is one of the single most important thing that you can have in a company.

He also expects that he needs to accept failure - if you demand perfection, then people are less likely to innovate because you cannot anticipate every nuance in a complex world.

As I learnt in my entrepreneurial studies most entrepreneurs deal with the imperfect idea and tweak it as they go along. Remember the great quote from Edison who spent ages trying to get the bulb to work and said to a friend who asked him why he had failed to develop the bulb.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

He also feels that it is important to give people time off - especially if they have been working on a long or hard project to go and have some time off outside of their normal holiday and when they come back they are refreshed and can do the hard work. Also he feels that they can reflect on their experiences and pass those lessons on and use the break as a means of looking at a project with new eyes which means that they will do better work.

Campbell then goes on to say that in addition to innovation that he also pushes hard on best practices. He wants his employees to have a hunger to discover best practice so that in the absence of innovation there is the small tweak that will make the team/organisation more effective He gives high grades to people who know what is going on in their industry and can adapt quickly to meet the problems that clients have.

Effectively he is saying that technical excellence is a base but that it needs to be aligned with commercial knowledge - not only of the client but the industry drivers also.

It is an interesting article and is definitely going into my folder of articles covering innovation as it is one of my passions and one which knowledge management can help to deliver in a organisation.If you wish a copy, I will look to dig it out.

Dilbert and innovation

One of the elements that brightens my day is looking at Dilbert. When I got home last night, there was a great cartoon for the day, which should be read in conjunction with my post of February 27th. How many times have you presented an idea to people in your team and then asked for feedback from them.

I have to admit I've been in a fair few meetings where this level of feedback shown to Dilbert has been given albeit in different words.

Maybe companies should impose the rule that Unilever did which was to encourage 'Build' i.e build on what people have said rather than looking at the negative.

My personal idea is that for every negative comment a person has to come up with three positives about an idea. A more positive approach to new ideas at least makes the person feel as if they have had a hearing rather than discover the soul sapping comments that make you feel thin inside.

I'm sure all of us can relate to Dilbert's experience at one time or another but wouldn't it be nice if it was the exception rather than the norm in an organisation.

Innovation is super fragile. It’s very easy to kill

This is my 150th post in nearly two years of blogging - never thought I'd have so much to put down in this blog - but the world moves and I like to capture peoples ideas and add my own thoughts.

Reading through one of the blogs from Luke Naismith, he has asked people to come up with known innovation killers.

I do recognise that managers are busy people who have time and budgetary constraints to deal with and don’t always have the time to consider the good idea that some one in their team has worked on.

I’m fortunate as a lot of my ideas in my working life have been taken up though not always immediately, though I’ve been though my career all the stages in the cartoon above.

I was reading an interesting article by one of my old professors Michael West at Aston University in Birmingham.

He highlighted what Machiavelli wrote in ‘Il Principe’ that innovators face a perilous journey because they face opposition from those that have a vested interest in the status quo and only lukewarm support until it has been proved by people experiencing the innovation. The danger of being a pioneer sometimes is that you end up like in the Wild west with a lot of arrows in your back.

He also highlights research that there is a large body of research shows’ that individuals alone generate more ideas at least as good as groups working together. The best way rather than having a brainstorm session is 'to have individuals work silently on this for a few moment and then to have everyone share their ideas together – with the leader speaking last’ This avoids the leader framing the issue for the rest of the group especially subordinates.


Marshall McLuhan once said: “In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.”

The usual idea killers that I’ve heard are

• ‘It’s an interesting idea but…… then with 5 compelling and plausible reasons why one should delay in a manner that would make Sir Humphrey of Yes Minister fame purr with pleasure.

• We don’t think that our clients will think this is something our firm should be doing
  

and my personal favourite

• ‘Haven’t you got enough to do in the day’

Perhaps one day we can change the discipline when an innovation is discussed to say Yes and….. and build up the idea so that it is explored and developed before approval or rejection. Another useful technique is to use ‘ How to’ questions.

Ideas are fragile creatures and managers need to work to find ways to allow people to explore either individually (or if they feel the need a team) but also to provide a platform so that that idea can be exploited. People too are fragile and need to feel that if an idea has been rejected they need to know the rationale why, not to give up, and that future ideas are welcome.

Otherwise they tend not to use what you have employed them for – their brains, vision and skill and can become de-motivated individuals.

A collection of Ideas in 2007

As an on line subscriber, I read the New York Times to pick up ideas and trends from over the Atlantic

In my review on Tuesday night, I found the link to the annual New York times looking at the last year in terms of ideas.

Some of them are strange some of them thought provoking. If you click on the title of this blog - then it will take you right there.

If you want a good read for what might occur in 2008 - I can strongly recommend a publication by the Economist called "The World in 2008" I've got all the editions for the last 10 years - as occasionally I like to flick backwards and forwards to see if there is an idea that got lost whose time might have come.

Anyway enjoy.

The Gallivespians go live

Didn’t post over the weekend – as I was busy not only with Xmas shopping, but also watching the Boks beat Wales up without slipping out of first gear.

I shall be interested to see how they play when it is an exhibition match – I think that people will be surprised how skilful they are in their back line.

Anyway I digress I was watching this evening the news about the launch of ‘The Golden Compass’ which is the film adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s book ‘Northern Lights’.

At the time I was browsing through an old copy of the Economist which highlighted work on unmanned automotive vehicles that are now the size of dragon flies and its eyes are effectively video cameras.

I was reminded of the Gallivespians who are a tiny race of people who appear in parts two and three of the trilogy and who ride dragon flies and act as spies for Lord Asriel.

Laboratories are developing these bug like devices with some as small as 60 milligrams.

I can imagine applications for this but also civil liberty concerns. Amazing how life imitates art. Or is it time to invest in a fly swat.

A longer post tomorrow on my readings on Gary Hamel.

The Google way to innovation

I was reading the New York Times online over the weekend and was reading an article about the Google Way for innovation.

Like the classic example of 3M - Google's engineers are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that interests them personally. This means that if you have a great idea, you always have time to run with it.

As I've discovered in my past people work harder if it is something that they are passionate about and are given time to do so. However, the article highlights the concept of the 'grouplet' when say something that you want to work on isn't say a new product or is something that is going to produce change that affects other departments. The article then mentions that these grouplets have no budget and they have no authority to decision make - but what they do have is a group of people who are looking to convince their organisation that this is an idea worth pursuing.

Say for example that you are looking to introduce a new working process or working on delivering a wiki as a means of delivering on a project. - then say a wiki grouplet might be a good idea and using people other than management as a means of selling the idea by giving talks to say a staff meeting or by holding brown bag lunches where people just drop in from the canteen to find out whats going on and putting their views in to the process.

The article extends the concept just to look at other areas such as a customer satisfaction fixit grouplet or even a grouplet to look at say ways that we can make a small improvement by losing a piece of bureaucracy.

Or my favorite: the Customer Happiness Fixit, when we fix all those little things that bug our users and make them sad — for example, when the hotkeys aren’t just right on mobile phones. Many of these events come with special T-shirts and gifts to reward the engineers who take a little time out to work on them.

The concept could be extended to be part of the new arrival induction process and people were encouraged to get involved with a grouplet. It helps with the induction process in my view and also starts to get people involved in the social networks that they need to cultivate them - but also you should be set this as a target as part of your appraisal process.

This of course can be a way to spread stories about the organisation but also by bringing in new views, then you can start to get new ideas looking at a problem. I'm not suggesting that there should be an anarchic situation and the grouplets need guidance to make sure they are aligned with the company interest.

Having a lot of people who are self-organising can be powerfully positive or negative, and not every idea is a good one. Therefore, all grouplets should be 'registered' with an organisers and that they should meet at least monthly to ensure that there aren't two grouplets doing the same work or doing work that is at cross purposes with the other.

Passionate people doing things that they are self interested in and supported by their peers can be a powerful combination in helping your company not only to innovate but also to ensure that it's internal processes are dynamic.

Innovation - Economist Special report

If you are struggling through the interminable British postal dispute - or don't subscribe to the Economist - this weeks edition has a 14 page special article on Innovation. I'll be reading this with interest and will try and pick some useful snippets.

Just remember the quote from Stuart Brand who famously argued that “information wants to be free.” So surely the knowledge worker, the creator of that information, also needs the same freedom. Companies and governments can find an innovator inside everyone; they just need to liberate them. Moreover, the rising tide of inventions that make one country wealthy benefits others that bring those clever ideas to market or simply make use of those products, processes and services.

Perhaps one day organisations will liberate employees and enable them to use their brains. To paraphrase Karl Marx workers need to liberate them selves - you only have your jobs to save.....

Prusak's comments on the deadly sins of Knowledge Management

As promised last week (Thursdays post), I am summarising Prusak's comments as to whether the sins are still valid and here they are - slightly long post as I've added my own comments.

Error 1: This is still one big error. A lot of managers and staff confuse information and knowledge - and this situation is aided by people trying to flog IT database solutions to a variety of organisations. Still information only becomes knowledge when we add the human dimension of awareness - to make that jump forward.

Error 2: There has been some progress on this - adjusting Bacon's comments - knowledge be nothing unless it is spread. Knowledge flow is important not the documents in a database. When I did some research on this I found the vast majority of people didn't look for documents in excess of four months old to help them in their day to day work.

Error 3: Prusak felt he would write it differently today. While knowledge is still produced and absorbed by people the distinctions between where the knowledge actually resides isn't always a hanging offence - so long as it is easily available

Error 4: I'll take Prusak's comments in full. "This is as true as ever, even more so with virtuality and all its discontents gaining adherents. Context is a good synonym for knowledge itself, and is best (perhaps only) created through live give and take, etc. It can't be done well, if at all, through email and other e-exchanges". I agree that it can't be done well through e-mail but I believe that if you have trust between people then e-exchanges can work well

Error 5: He feels that too much has been made between tacit and explicit knowledge,. He feels that knowledge is always both tacit AND explicit and I would add also needs to be contextual and relevant to people

Error 6: This one is also still true. KM in general follows pragmatism as a philosophy in not believing in distinctions between knowing and action. Knowledge is important if it is spread and is used by people

Error 7: Prusak comments "Well, anyone who thinks that anti-intellectualism isn't a very strong force in American and UK culture is just out to lunch. If anything it's gotten stronger with the continuous use of varied media like IM, Google, etc. to replace real reflection and serious reading. I travel all the time and in contrast to years ago, I almost never see people reading anything substantial while flying. I'm told by friends who teach MBAs at the "top" schools that they can't get their students to read anything not online."

I'd agree with Prusak's comments as when I talked to senior managers in two organisations there was concern that younger staff did not put the time into reflecting and undertake reading and that people accepted on line information as gospel to be cut and pasted. However as they were both professional service firms with a billable hour model, I did wonder how much encouragement they gave to people to reflect on the work they had undertaken and ways that research was properly recognised or even trained into their junior employees.

Error 8: This is also part of a bigger discussion about how to escape the grip of short-termism in organisations.

This is definitely the case in all organisations that I have studied - will it help me meet my quarterly targets or will it help me meet my billable hour targets. In our busy and time pressured work spaces the danger is that we fall back on the tried and tested that has worked in the past and the problem is that it may not meet the challenges that our customers want us to help them solve.

We need to reflect on the past to help us meet the future - if we are to escape the Santayana paradox.

Error 9: To managers rewarding failure is counter intuitive. But we must do it to have a culture of knowledge growth. How else can any organisation learn if it is afraid to do and think things?

I've lectured on this at a conference this year - if you don't have an organisation that recognises the importance of experimentation and failure and has a risk averse culture then not only is it reducing knowledge flow, it is also potentially cutting off it's chances of innovation.

Error 10: I agree with Prusak that this battle has been won - nobody believes that technology on its own can deliver KM in an organisation. It is a combination of people, process, technology and culture.

I do wonder though if Web 2.0 is the case of the dragon getting out from behind the rock. We can have all the blogs and wikis in the world in our organisations. But unless people want to share knowledge and the internal processes share this then it is unlikely to happen and once again the poor hapless IT department gets blamed for not delivering the promised ROI on an IT investment. Also there is the danger of busy managers using IT as a tick box to deliver KM because it means they don't have to deal with the long term issues of their organisational culture and people management etc etc.

Error 11: Once again, Prusak believes that this battle is won. There is some interesting research into this and it will develop in the future. However one organisation I studied did want me to produce knowledge metrics and didn't appreciate it when I couldn't produce them in terms of £ shillings and pence.

McKinsey on Management practices that work - lessons for knowledge managers

Recently received some information from McKinsey on the subject of what makes companies perform well. They studied and reviewed over 100,000 questionnaires to uncover the practices of 400 business units in 230 companies around the world. Unfortunately, it doesn't say how many of these were knowledge based organisations - but one can imagine that there was a goodly percentage.

The analysis eventually discovered a common winning combination: They were

1. clear roles for employees (accountability), 
2. a compelling vision of change (direction), 
3. and an environment that encourages openness, trust, and challenge (culture). 

Apparently no other option came close in improving organisational performance.

What’s more, the study found that organisational and financial performance correlate directly. An analysis of a global energy group’s production facilities, for example, suggested that for a facility of typical size and margins, better organisational performance had a payoff of $25 million to $30 million. Whilst this doesn't directly extrapolate to say a professional service firm - energy groups have been fairly successful in delivering returns on knowledge management. 

I was particularly interested in point no 3 as if that type of culture is truly in operation then it is likely that knowledge sharing in an organisation will flourish. 

Also it needs courage from the leaders not to abandon the way forward when the transition to a new way of working and performance may suffer slightly whilst your team are developing new ways of knowledge sharing. 

It also does not take into account the concept of tight and loose coupling as mentioned by John Roberts within an organisational structure and my next post will be on this concept.

However one area that is lacking is in disciplined experimentation and an ability to fail. I've always found that if we are allowed to fail responsibly we not only learn lessons but can pass those lessons on to fellow co-workers.

Although an interesting article, I feel that it needs to perhaps extend this research to the knowledge based organisation.

Knowledge combinations in work

Not wishing to sound like a blues song, but I woke up this morning to listen to two commentators discussing the use of Facebook in the work place. The discussion seemed to veer between two extremes. 

My experience is that most people are sensible in their use of internet facilities and Facebook is another example of internet usage. Whilst I'm sure that some people may 'goof off' using the Internet, it makes me wonder whether an organisation is providing fulfilling work for people if they feel the need to use Facebook for such long periods of time. 

However not one of the commentators considered the case for internal  facebook style networking which I have discussed in previous posts.

Maybe we need to be intelligent enough  as an organisation to say that if people are using Facebook to access, say, a professional network for IT people, or say as a KM professional,  posting to get peoples views on a issue then it is a justifiable use; as ultimately it is of benefit to an employee and to the organisation, as it is helping to speed up the process of work by helping people tap into other peoples knowledge base. 

Perhaps if organisations treated their staff like professional adults rather than micro managing them and what they do, they will get the professional adult behaviour that their organisation needs.

Interestingly today I read a McKinsey report about connecting employees to create value in investment banks.

One of the problems that investment banks have is to leverage talent across the various business units that they have. However clients just as in other professional service firms are looking for services that are integrated and tap a variety of functions. 

The problem tends to be that organisations have departments that have grown so large and have their own targets to achieve, that they have frozen these departments into silos. By asking people to achieve short term targets or billable hour targets they have frozen out the possibility for people to develop true collaborative and professional networks.

Some organisations have tried to do this by combining parts of the organisation but that of course can be disruptive in terms of merging two cultures say a tax department with a corporate department in a law firm.

Another way that it could be done the article posits is the use of informal networks and utilising what I proposed at Wragges,     with the use of deep dive interviews to not only share knowledge but also to investigate the opportunities for possible collaboration and for creating innovative new services.

Another approach that was not considered in the article was the use of an internal Facebook style approach which, can help organisations to understand internal networks Another approach considered was by analysing the internal flows of e-mails to see who is connecting to who internally. 

All this is very good but I also discovered whilst carrying out my knowledge audit that one of the best approaches in identifying the internal networkers and they key people in them and especially the people who were in more than one group was by talking to people on the 'shop floor' and finding out who the key players are in the organisation. 

To assist the co-operation in terms of encouraging this it needs to ensure that it considers ways of developing initiatives to develop people who undertake horizontal promotions as a way of not only understanding the organisation better but also as a means of developing cross fertilisation. 

Another way is for the management team to look at ways that it can concentrate on themes that cross boundaries say no more than 3 - 5 with real economic benefits not only to the organisation but to the people in the group themselves. 

Organisations are, as I was reminded in this mornings discussion, profit making, not charitable, and knowledge sharing and encouraging these groups do need to have some economic benefit to the organisation or it's not worth undertaking it in work time.

These can have the benefit of not only sharing knowledge but also identifying talent throughout the organisation.

Just when you got hold of Web 2.0

Up pops - Web 3.0.
Recently there was a speech by Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google in Seoul where he was asked to define Web 3.0.

According to Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web he said the following:-

After first joking that Web 2.0 is “a marketing term”, Schmidt launched into a great definition of Web 3.0. He said that while Web 2.0 was based on Ajax, Web 3.0 will be “applications that are pieced together” - with the characteristics that the apps are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the apps can run on any device (PC or mobile), the apps are very fast and very customizable, and are distributed virally (social networks, email, etc).

On other blogs such as Rod Boothby's Innovation Creators - he too highlights Schmidt's comments.

Earlier on this year he got involved with a start up called Teqlo which is building up composite applications and making it customisable. I think that this is going to be interesting to see how this allied to some of the Google apps that I am increasingly starting to use as a test bed will change the world of enterprise IT.

Who will be the first firm to ditch Microsoft Office and utilise a Google Enterprise App and then tweak it accordingly -by using some of Teqlo's or any similar firms ability to deliver a build for you application.

Apple's new operating system will allow people to use a web link and make it act as a widget and I can see uses for this in industry if we have as Apple does a sub screen with widgets - getting the information you need from the enterprise database in real time and then when you call the sub screen up there it is for you - rather than having to write an e-mail to someone trying to find out the information.


I think that these Cloud based operating systems are going to help knowledge workers in the new world and help to improve the process of work - so watch this space.

However, if you type Web 3.0 into your search engine then you get a significant number of hits - I think 144m possibilities - but if you want to explore where this is going then go to Wikipedia and see what others are saying about this area. The other thing that is going to need to occur especially if video is involved is that we are going to need better bandwidth certainly in the UK and also ways to help people filter the information better.

Colour me beautiful

Been trawling the internet and by the usual serendipity, came upon an article on wikipedia that might be useful if say for example it was used on an internal wiki.

UCSC Wiki Lab

What the article goes on to say and it is not a very large survey - would be to colour code articles based on relaibility of the article by the editing. It looks like the entries are analysed on how long they stay up without unediting.

It isn't foolproof but it might be another way to help people find the articles they can rely on. Another thought that I have had is whether at some stage it might be possible to do this using the delicious system of increasing text size in relation to hits.

Just a Sunday morning thought whilst listening to some classical music.