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• 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. 

Knowledge Management Books from the Syre Consulting English Bookshop

The question we have been often asked, and subsequently worked on, is : "How can we leverage a tried and trusted knowledge base (that we built up in our home country) across new companies we have acquired in Europe?"  Usually this question is not asked before the acquisition or the merger.  It is asked a few months or a couple of years later, when the question "How can we make better use of what we know that we know or that we don't know that we know" becomes paramount.   

We have experience of facilitating cross-border work and cross-cultural knowledge management in FMCG (fast moving consumer goods companies), the aerospace industry, in professional services companies, the pharmaceutical industry and many other industries.  Our job is not to be expert in the content of each of these industries, that is the job of your own experts.  Where we add value is by bringing our experience, facilitation skills and processes into play when there is a need for you to share present knowledge among a wider circle of experts, to create new products,  markets or levels of efficiency by leveraging present knowledge, or when you need to create new knowledge based on what you know your experts are capable of doing.

There are many ways of managing organisational knowledge, but each must be tailored to the context of the company.  Knowledge is two things : it is both a stock and a flow.  But many companies get stuck at the stock stage, they sit on static knowledge and dead human and intellectual capital.  To make the knowledge, human capital and intellectual capital flow you need to put in place a set of fairly simple activities and processes, some of them based on human resource practice and some of them based on technology.  

  Everything we do for our clients at Systèmes et Ressources (also known as Syre Consulting) has to do with knowledge management, whether it is team building, organising best practice seminars or internal-coaching seminars in which your professionals educate each other or by explaining how to put in place knowledge bases rooted in the practice of your company and not in the language of IT-speak.  Savvy practitioners know that Knowledge management is not only about technology, especially for multinational or international companies.  It is also about managing knowledge workers and professionals across borders and getting them to share their knowledge, build new competencies, reinforce old competencies and discard no longer useful competencies.  

Before the advent of writing, accrued wisdom, daily updating of the group via story-telling and group-mythologising were very good knowledge management tools.  They still are.  But today, we have information technology and this leads some people to forget the fact that we need to leverage IT with practical knowledge of different national cultures and business practices.  Conversations, Gossip and Stories all exist in Belgium, Holland, France, the United States and the United Kingdom and they can all be perceived positively or negatively : as ways of creating knowledge and making it flow or as ways for change-resistant people to create push-back against perceived foreign intervention.  

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 ]