.....................................................

• If God were to humiliate a human being, He would deny him knowledge.
• No wealth equals the mind, no poverty equals ignorance, no heritage equals culture, and no support is greater than advice.
• Wisdom is the believer's quest, to be sought everywhere, even among the deceitful.
• A person is worth what he or she excels at.
• No wealth can profit you more than the mind, no isolation can be more desolate than conceit, no policy can be wiser than prudence, no generosity can be better than decency, no heritage can be more bountiful than culture, no guidance can be truer than inspiration, no enterprise can be more successful than goodness, and no honour can surpass knowledge.
• Knowledge is superior to wealth.  Knowledge guards you whereas you guard wealth.  Wealth decreases with expenditure, whereas knowledge multiplies with dissemination.  A good material deed vanishes as the material resources behind it vanish, whereas to knowledge we are indebted forever.  
• Thanks to knowledge, you command people's respect during your lifetime and their kind memory after your death.
• Knowledge rules over wealth.  Those who treasure wealth perish while they are still alive, whereas scholars live forever.  They only disappear in physical image, but in others' hearts their memories are enshrined.
• Knowledge is the twin of action.  He who is knowledgeable must act.  Knowledge calls upon action; if answered, it will stay.  Otherwise, it will depart. 

Has not every well-managed firm explicit knowledge of what it has to do to capitalise on its tacit knowledge or to fill in its resource gaps ?  Or are the fairly recent examples of Dow Chemical and IBM finding millions of dollars worth of innovation lying dormant in unmanaged, costly to renew, patents fairly typical of the real world ?  What about your company ?  Does it  have a specific programme of activities to find out what it knows, does it actively use what it knows, does it know what sort of intellectual capital it has in its culture and in the brains of its employees, in the minds of its customers or which it has patented ?   Does it proactively attempt to fill in its resource or competency gaps, or does it just wait for the right person to come along ?

Many companies are not aware of their blind side(s).  You have to be constantly on the look-out for market signals with regard to demographic change, to new sources of competition and to innovation which could present new opportunities for its your distinctive knowledge or, on the other hand, blow you out of the water ?  You came up with that incredible product or service 5, 10 or 15 years ago so it is only human to continue to pat yourself on the back and to hope that good luck will throw you another success.  But what about the competitors who are stalking you and whom you don't even know about ?  What about the category-killing technology you haven't even heard about ?  What about the employees who are leaving you because they cannot use their knowledge, their creativity and their problem-solving skills in your environment ?  In this world of ferocious competition are they going to not invent or bring to market elsewhere what they could not implement in your company ? Human intelligence, active use of knowledge and vigilance are the three keys to continuing success in fast-changing markets.  Are you using 99% of the human intelligence in your company or 9.99 % ?  How much do you know about what your company knows ?  How vigilant is your company ?  

There are things the firm does not know that it knows.  This is where to get the biggest bang for your buck in Knowledge Management territory. It is well attested that human beings have biases : we have a bias to hiring people who went to the same school, who play the same sports, who wear suits we think we would look good in, and we are also biased towards being satisfied with the information we find closest to hand, especially if isn't known that there is better information, which could better serve the project, a little farther away in the company. In such cases, we and the firm do less well than we are capable of doing.  If only we knew what was going on elsewhere in the company !  If only we were capable of sharing best practicies across departments !   If only the company had some sort of mechanism in place to let other parts of itself know that the wheel has already been invented !  That's right, there should be no need to invent it again.  Yet, many enormous companies while knowing that they have some sort of institutional knowledge, do not know what exactly it is.  They guiltily find themselves reinventing what has already been done, or worse, failing time and again in projects in which they have already failed. 

A major part of managing knowledge is learning from our mistakes and failures, but they have to be admitted as such, and accepted.  A work environment of unconditional acceptance must be encouraged.  A knowledge bank of what has worked and what has not worked must be in place.  How good is your company's knowledge bank ?   What sort of information does it contain about past failures, which could be turned to your advantage, past successes which could be further built upon ?  

Another important objective of managing knowledge is to leverage wealth through nurturing intellectual capital, as Texaco and BP have done, yet many firms do not realise that their traditional budgeting processes destroy intellectual capital, stifle initiative, undermine the drive to increase shareholder value, fail to support customer service and act as a barrier to process improvement.  What about your budgeting system ?  Is it something you think about with pleasure or something you prefer to forget ?  If your reply tends to the latter part of the spectrum, beware !  Your company is definitely destroying more wealth than it is creating.

Paradoxically, in an ambiguous world we need ambivalence and "ambivalence" in an organisational setting means the meeting and creative confrontation of many minds.  Better encouragement and management of information redundancies can often avoid superfluous action. But recent massive layoffs, re-engineering and other phenomena such as downsizing have often  signalled the arrival of the grim reaper.  New information and communications technologies have rarely been used to their full potential to communicate within the walls of the company the sort of information that used to be sent by word of mouth, or imitated between apprentice and master. Information can circulate fairly easily within a group of up to about 150 people, but it has problems jumping over the natural barriers formed between groups, cities, regions, countries and languages.

Knowledge Management is not new.  It has always been an essential part of success, but it used to be a lot easier in small groups.  The techniques of knowledge codification, management and transfer are as traditional as human speech around the wood fire, and as modern as GroupWare "…a concept which designates both the human and organisational processes of working in a group and the technological tools which favour it." (Jean-Yves Prax, La Gestion électronique documentaire, 1998, Paris, InterEditions).

There is often some confusion between Information Systems, Electronic Document Management and Knowledge Management. As a general rule, as soon as the technology part of a project begins to cost more than one third of the budget, it is no longer a Knowledge Management project, but an Information Technology project. A good Electronic Document Management system is quite often a necessary, but is not a sufficient, basis for a Knowledge Management system.

http:/www.cam-i.org/ : The Beyond Budgeting Round Table shares the belief that budgets are at the root of many of today's management problems. The BBRT is a thought leader in finding better performance models than budgets. Its site contains examples of companies which have dismantled the budgeting process and now find themselves with more satisfied employees, loyal customers and better performance.

http://www.undp.org/rbas/ahdr/ : Here you can find downloadable versions of the Arab Human Development Report published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 2002.

http://www.sveiby.com.au : This is the site of Karl-Erik Sveiby, a Swedish pioneer in the area of knowledge management. He is at the moment a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia.

http://knowledgecreators.com/km/kes/kes1.htm : This online learning module is an introduction to the concepts of intangible assets and knowledge flows according to author Karl Erik Sveiby.

The Knowledge-Creating Company : How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation.

Enabling Knowledge Creation : How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation.

Managing Industrial Knowledge : Edited by Ikujiro Nonaka and David Teece.

[French Training Program]  [English Presentation ]