Posted by Jay Reay on April 05, 1998 at 20:11:44:

In Reply to: Tayloristic Culture and 'Art of the Long View' posted by Yogesh Malhotra on April 04, 1998 at 23:34:50:

Yogesh and Robbert
This is an interesting thread from its set of questions and also from my impression that we have here three different perspectives which yet meld into one approach.

The essence is that "change" per se is good, if it is appropriate and if it is possible to introduce it within an organisation effectively without disruption.

Secondly, the wisdom inherent in people (of any age but certainly of pertinant experience, and personal maturity requisite to expedite knowledge transfer) is a major part of the organisation's knowledge bank. We may need to visit the difference here between "knowing" and "information".

The third is that a defined management regime is important; Yogesh's examples of EDS and Kao are good in that a set, agreed strategy of managed knowledge capture and dissemination is at the heart of their policy. Young (by Japanese standards) managers from Kao were amongst the most stimulating and "Western" of my Japanese students because they were allowed more latitude than their Japanese counterparts from other companies to question the status quo and to leverage corporate knowledge; at the same time they had the Japanese advantage of a wide experience - they had been at work since University for at least ten years, moving every 2 years or so between departments, including shopfloor sales and warehousing time - real knowledge development!

One of the lessons we have to learn is that a business is often around for much longer than the effective time of an individual's career. The implications are, for the person that what we do today has an impact on the future, but is only a part of the picture (not one of us is the whole), and for the organisation that it needs to be able to access our knowledge in the (probable) event of our unavailability.

"Marketing myopia" is a key cause of the decline of many of our clients who have had a previously succesful business and cannot understand what is happening to them today. In many cases we discover that they could have foreseen the downturn in sales achievement if they had shared knowledge in a real strategic sense. By this I mean not just making information available, but in putting that into context, and presenting it in ways which cut through the chaff of everyday work and recahes into the consciousness of strategic managers so that the realities of the specific business are seen, heard, understood and impact upon the strategic psyche, for tactical benefit. In bigger organisations this is possible because they can resource people to look for such opportunites. For the smaller business this is a luxury they cannot (even if they should) afford. In this case we need to create knowledge management strategies which efficiently enable strategic vision.

Culture, and whether we should attempt to influence it for the "better" or accept the staus quo and redefine the KM strategy accordingly, is important. My clients accept the need to bite the bullet even though they know this will be painful (for them personally), because every entrepreneur > owner/manager > top executive reaches a point in their personal careers at which they come to the uncormfortable conclusion that what they have created will or should continue beyond their business life, if it is worth anything at all, and the best legacy they can leave is to enable their proteges to use their knowledge. This is the reality with which we are confronted every day, in the SME business if not with our mega-corp clients.

This whole question is at the very heart of what we are attempting to understand, so please continue the dialogue - I find it fascinating and learn much from it.

Jay

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• Re: Tayloristic Culture and 'Art of the Long View' Yogesh Malhotra 13:20:38 4/09/98 (0)

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