The early-winter holiday break is an opportunity to recharge our batteries and refocus our strategies. Amidst visiting with family and friends, I took time to reflect on the recent past and what the future holds. Among other things, I realized that over time my clients have been paying more attention to the top half of the Knowledge […]
I hope each of you is enjoying this new year — whenever it is that you celebrate its beginning. For me, 2017 is already full of new beginnings and revelations. To recap: Launch of KVC Clinic v.2.0 In the fall of 2016, we launched an expanded version of our KVC Clinic. This includes three days […]
I have a nightmarish pet scenario that as we as a society gain non-stop access to ever-increasing data, there is a risk that we actually get progressively dumber — as we lose the ability to process and analysis that data sufficiently. My idea got a workout this week during election night when the polling industry, […]
“I’m stuck at the bottom of the pyramid.” “My value is unclear to people who matter.” “I’m invisible.” In conducting “Points of Pain” exercises during TKA’s workshops and on-site clinics, too often we hear things like this from competent and hard-working knowledge producers. In study after study, roughly half of the challenges expressed by PRODUCERS of […]
I pay close attention to feedback I receive on the KVC and other analytic frameworks we are developing. Many times I make revisions based on this feedback — that’s why the KVC Handbook is now on its fourth major edition. One of the things I’ve heard is that the KVC model is too idealistic. Even […]
Information has its greatest value when it is most available to, and accessible by, people for immediate use in understanding their world. I not only believe this, I put this insight to work in my consulting and teaching. To implement this, I often use stories from the headlines to illustrate my key points. There are […]
Knowledge Management would be better off as a discipline if it leaned into the management side more, and relied a little less exclusively on the knowledge side. It’s possible to read articles or even whole books on KM and find little discussion specifying the knowledge that people use, specifically how they use it in producing […]
The other day I received an email from “Susan”, an alumna of the Columbia IKNS program whom I had the good fortune to work with as one of my students there. Susan’s question to me was on research, which that program touches upon but doesn’t cover in great depth, and in which I have lots […]
Most of us work in virtual meetings often, some of us almost exclusively. People call in using Google Hangouts, Skype, GoToMeeting, WebEx, JoinMe, Free Conference, and so on. (I’m speaking here of “virtual meetings for the rest of us,” not the high-end meeting rooms costing hundreds of thousands.) The hybrid meeting I’ve been part of […]
I used our recent office relocation to review some files I had not visited in a while. Though an arduous undertaking, it provided some surprising rewards. Among other things, I came across one of my first major projects, done with the great firm of Peat, Marwick, Mitchell — which soon after became KPMG. Out client […]
A few weeks ago I attended a reunion at my alma mater, Yale University. As they always do, Yale offered up some of its most articulate faculty and administrators to describe the current state of affairs at the University. The array of talent, initiative, and innovation on display was dazzling. By the end of the […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
I read the following headline recently in the Wall Street Journal: “Consumers crave [PRODUCT], but [PRODUCERS] enjoying their best profits ever are reluctant to switch.” (The words I’ve bolded here were specified in the article, but I’ll get to that in a minute.) Headlines reminiscent of this have been written many times in business history. […]