Knowledge Strategy, Uncategorized

PARALLEL WORLDS 1: The Physical and the Epistemic

2 Feb 2024  

Being essentially a simple-minded person, I try to boil things down their barest essence. I return often to the symmetry of the two parallel worlds we all inhabit simultaneously: the physical (the material world of people, places, and things that we perceive with our senses  — ‘atoms,’ in short) and the epistemic (the virtual world […]

Knowledge Strategy, Organization and Management

A brief pause

4 Jan 2024  

Once we have moved past the darkest night of the year, the fortunate among us hit pause on our busy lives to reconnect and hang with friends and family — to drink, dine, talk, laugh, maybe even sing and dance — and to reboot our mental circuits. For me, it’s also a chance to search […]

Knowledge Strategy, Organization and Management

Enterprise Knowledge: What is it?

3 Dec 2023  

I refer often to “enterprise knowledge” — but what do I mean?  (And no, not discussions about which are the best Star Trek episodes.}  Last month at KMWorld23, the range of content-rich presentations I heard and absorbing conversations I had reminded me of the Hindu tale of the six blind men and the elephant. Each […]

Branding and Reputation, Competitiveness and Innovation, Knowledge Strategy, Organization and Management, Security and Privacy

Knowledge governance in the age of AI

24 Oct 2023  

Governance: what is it good for? I’ve recently had the good fortune to observe a lot of the enlightening programming by Paul Washington and his team at The Conference Board’s ESG Center. It’s clear to me that, while “E” environmental and “S” social goals are ones that most of us can understand and relate to, […]

Knowledge Strategy

War of the Words

22 Jun 2023  

That title’s not a typo — it’s an homage to the 19th century inventor of a wildly successful new form of story — science fiction.  H.G. Wells authored many stories and non-fiction books, but is best-remembered now for his mind-bending tales The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds. Wells attributed his […]

Knowledge Strategy, Metrics and Measurement

Managing the Unmeasurable

27 Feb 2023  

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”  We’ve all heard that.  Metrics makes things real; they are the language of management, just as they are the language of science and technology.  As the diagram shows, there’s a rinse-and-repeat relationship between measurement and management. But knowledge, especially as it applies to the enterprise, cannot […]

Knowledge Strategy, Organization and Management

Zombie Knowledge

18 Jan 2023  

Whenever I teach or lecture, I count it a success when I also discover something new.  My knowledge dynamics workshop with a roomful of enthusiastic knowledge practitioners at KMWorld 2022 provided me with a huge insight on the nature of change in knowledge. What is knowledge dynamics? Two related constructs formed the core of our […]

Knowledge Strategy, Organization and Management

Knowledge Erosion: How to Avoid It

21 Nov 2022  

I encourage knowledge professionals to continually engage — as directly as possible — with the most pressing strategic challenges facing their client organizations. And I rarely give advice I don’t follow myself. So when I was recently invited by Fisher Yu and his team at MentoringCo to address the issue of the erosion of tacit […]

Organization and Management

Your Business: It’s PEOPLE!

18 Apr 2022  

Throughout my long and fascinating business career, it’s become a shop-worn organizational truism that “people are our most important asset.” Sure, that makes those of us hearing it — who (needless to say) are ourselves people — feel good. But most companies have never fully acted as if they took this cliché too seriously. Who […]

Organization and Management

The Power of Purpose

6 Feb 2022  

In my recent study of corporate purpose for The Conference Board (TCB), I conclude that, “Purpose is a key element in the corporate narrative—the story a company continually tells to its various constituencies [i.e., stakeholders]. It is, in short, why the company exists. While different organizations have varying ideas of what constitutes Purpose, The Conference […]

Knowledge Strategy

Introducing Knowledge Resources Management (KRM)

19 Jan 2022  

In November 2021 I had the honor and pleasure of addressing the annual KM World conference — a group I had not spoken with in more than two decades. The first part of my talk focused on the ROI of knowledge, which I explore at great length in my latest book The Value of Knowledge […]

Organization and Management

The Hierarchy of Intention

22 Aug 2021  

I’ve been working with a client on the issue of increasing engagement and motivation among knowledge workers. In so doing, I’ve been reconsidering intention — what motivates us, as individuals, to do things — and how does that translate to how we behave in groups and organizations? The masons and the cathedral I love the parable of […]