Leveraging Knowledge Management

It is ironic that so many companies have an abundance of knowledge, but fail to use it for managing the business. Knowledge is a critical resource that warrants much more attention. If we are serious about managing knowledge, then we need to embrace the concepts associated with knowledge management.

“Businesses, especially large ones, have little choice but to become information-based. To remain competitive, maybe even to survive, businesses will have to convert themselves into organizations of knowledge specialist.” – The Coming of the New Organization by Peter F. Drucker

Find Your Aggregation Points

The world is full of aggregators who can bring enormous value to your business. For example, you may hire great designers in Italy, enlist programmers from India, manufacture your product in China, and manage the business from the United States. Aggregation is the bringing together of different parts to meet important business objectives.  Aggregation often involves broad and global participation. And the use of aggregation results in higher value as opposed to doing everything in-house.

Start Measuring Intellectual Capital

Increasingly, businesses need to pay attention to growing the intellectual capital of the business. Hard assets (facilities, vehicles, equipment) lose value over time and may not provide the highest returns for the business. The soft stuff (talent, leadership, patents, innovation, etc.) creates the most value and return.

A good way to frame this challenge is to think in three’s. Start with the three main types of intellectual capital and the corresponding metrics:

Managing Complexity

You Must Understand Crowds to Manage Complexity

With so much change and uncertainty before us, one way to throw out the noise and traditional viewpoints is to aggressively manage complexity. When you start to manage complexity, you immediately gain some control over the change and uncertainty that you feel you have no control over. For example, “complexity theory” recognizes that crowds are a big factor related to complexity. Knowing something about the psychology of the crowd can be important to how you manage complexity.

Value through Motivation

Motivation is Critically Important to Business Success

So much of what drives value and greatness in any organization resides in how the people are managed. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great , has repeatedly emphasized the importance of attracting and retaining the best people. However, a big part of this has to do with motivating your people. When you focus on this single element of value, namely motivation, you can really unleash so much value and performance within any type of organization.

Why More Companies Should Consider OpEx over CapEx

The OpEx Approach Provides More Flexibility

Increasingly, businesses need to improve their focus by doing a few things exceptionally well as opposed to owning each and every long term investment. The level of in-house expertise required to support major investments simply does not exist within most companies. Couple this with the fact that we now live in a world driven by intellectual assets and not hard assets.

Humanizing the Financial Mindset

Why finance should take a more human view

Financial Statements, Organizational Charts, Employee Handbooks, and all those traditional things that go into running the business are increasingly unreliable, out-of-date, and ineffective in a world driven by human and intellectual capital. If leaders of organizations are honest about high performance and creating value, then they must pay close attention to the human side of running the business.

The 360 Degree Performance Evaluation

360 Feedback is Critical for Objective Evaluations

Managing human resource capital is now mission critical. One of the most effective tools for managing human resources is the 360-degree evaluation process. Traditionally, an employee is evaluated from a sole source (1 degree), namely the immediate supervisor or manager. However, employees interact with numerous sources: Co-workers, customers, Managers outside the employees department, vendors, contractors, and others. The 360- degree evaluation process relies on these multiple sources, providing a more balanced and objective approach to measuring employee performance. This leads to higher productivity, better customer service, and enhanced organizational performance.

Why Games Belong in the Workplace

Games elevate productivity and innovation

Suppose the world had a workforce that was highly skilled at solving some of the most challenging problems. This workforce is motivated, hard working and highly collaborative with others. And to make matters even better, this workforce is not driven by traditional rewards such as money, but more by the thrill of accomplishing something great. Such a workforce exists and it is estimated to be 500 million strong and growing rapidly. It's the workforce of gamers. People who play games are perhaps the most untapped resource on the planet. 

The Challenge of Becoming Customer Focused

Real Customer Focus is Difficult

If customers drive business success, then becoming customer focus is mission critical. Trying to stay customer focus is considerably difficult. Here are some of the many challenges you will have to confront if you expect to be customer focused: