In his book "Who says elephants can't dance?", Louis Gerstner, the CEO of IBM who is credited with its massive turnaround towards the end of the last century, talks about the painful process of re-engineering the organization, as part of the process of the turnaround he effected.Reading that part reminded me of the very similar problems that much smaller organizations face...ones who have grown rapidly, and suddenly find themselves in the 'A' league. They grew rapidly because of the entrepreneurial spirit of the core team, each person vested with the responsibility of making that division or department matter. This is especially true of the new age companies, those in the IT, Telecom and mobile segment. Equally suddenly, they begin to discover that what brought them to this point is not good enough to take them further.
We have experienced a similar situation as a smaller company getting acquired by a larger one, and suddenly having to cope with a vastly different cultural and business environment. The freedom and agility that made us successful and brought us to the attention of the company that acquired us suddenly became our bane; this was now perceived as chaotic and "unprofessional". The challenge became how to continue to remain nimble and agile while still being able to leverage the strength of the larger organization.
The question that remains is how do we teach the elephant to dance....or I would prefer to re-phrase that to "How do we not become elephants"!!! Can these organizations continue to remain agile, retain their entrepreneurial DNA, and yet draw immense strength from size? Does that size actually contribute to any of their strengths?
As an organization that develops and implements KM solutions, we have often been confronted by this question. I believe the ability of an organization to retain its core values is essential for its long-term survival and sustainability. As an organization grows in size, the traditional methods in which knowledge was shared and decisions begin to change. The oft-repeated "water-cooler" insights are no longer possible. However, these very insights that occurred in informal conversations (tacit knowledge) is what created the possibilities.
The organization needs to find new contexts to communicate, be related, and stay connected.
Insights that were possible because of conversations, and because the data needed to analyse them were smaller have now grown in order of magnitude. How can these still be parceled into smaller chunks that make them still conversation-worthy, and therefore create the potential for insights. How can managers be prompted to look at information, explore and discover lessons that they can apply.
Organizations can continue to be agile and entrepreneurial if the knowledge that they can harness from being a larger unit can be accessed easily, collaboration among these smaller units is available for the larger organization to benefit from, and it becomes possible for the organization to sense and respond to threats and opportunities without having to resort to militarization of their culture - uniform processes, monolithic systems, cumbersome workflows.
A framework that enables collaboration and sharing of insights, captures and transforms these insights into learning and promotes the institutionalization of a mechanism to leverage this learning will ensure that organizations can continue to appear chaotic, remain competitive and stay agile...and grow.
Would love to hear your views on this.
We have experienced a similar situation as a smaller company getting acquired by a larger one, and suddenly having to cope with a vastly different cultural and business environment. The freedom and agility that made us successful and brought us to the attention of the company that acquired us suddenly became our bane; this was now perceived as chaotic and "unprofessional". The challenge became how to continue to remain nimble and agile while still being able to leverage the strength of the larger organization.
The question that remains is how do we teach the elephant to dance....or I would prefer to re-phrase that to "How do we not become elephants"!!! Can these organizations continue to remain agile, retain their entrepreneurial DNA, and yet draw immense strength from size? Does that size actually contribute to any of their strengths?
As an organization that develops and implements KM solutions, we have often been confronted by this question. I believe the ability of an organization to retain its core values is essential for its long-term survival and sustainability. As an organization grows in size, the traditional methods in which knowledge was shared and decisions begin to change. The oft-repeated "water-cooler" insights are no longer possible. However, these very insights that occurred in informal conversations (tacit knowledge) is what created the possibilities.
The organization needs to find new contexts to communicate, be related, and stay connected.
Insights that were possible because of conversations, and because the data needed to analyse them were smaller have now grown in order of magnitude. How can these still be parceled into smaller chunks that make them still conversation-worthy, and therefore create the potential for insights. How can managers be prompted to look at information, explore and discover lessons that they can apply.
Organizations can continue to be agile and entrepreneurial if the knowledge that they can harness from being a larger unit can be accessed easily, collaboration among these smaller units is available for the larger organization to benefit from, and it becomes possible for the organization to sense and respond to threats and opportunities without having to resort to militarization of their culture - uniform processes, monolithic systems, cumbersome workflows.
A framework that enables collaboration and sharing of insights, captures and transforms these insights into learning and promotes the institutionalization of a mechanism to leverage this learning will ensure that organizations can continue to appear chaotic, remain competitive and stay agile...and grow.
Would love to hear your views on this.
4 comments:
Enjoyed reading as always. Your style of writing is simply superb.
Elephant to Dance with Knowledge Sharing !!!
Make processes simple even if monolithic; enable voices to be heard, small or large; show that grass-root thoughts are heard by those in the ivory-tower. These "empower" each person in the organization to feel like a contributing part of the whole. Nimbleness comes out of this as a company is as nimble as its individual constituents. IMHO.
Interesting post Raghu. From my experience in KM, i would say that we should focus KM on Knowledge Consumption not Sharing. This is an important but subtle distinction. If we focus on consumption, we tend to create forums where knowledge can be consumed and absorbed. Yes this is much harder to do, but even if we do this in a small scale to start with and figure out the methods scaling can be done. It is very hard for people to consume/absorb knowledge from another employee for a variety of reasons. So even if knowledge is being shared, whether that knowledge is put to use is very hard to get done. The root causes for this problem can be found in the discipline of change management. Given this problem of knowledge consumption and the context of a firm and its culture, a solution can be created which when implemented widely can result in the solving of the KM problem in the long term.
Hope that helps.
Thanks Sukumar for that insightful feedback. I must confess I have not looked at it from this perspective. I guess when we say "Consumption" it is implicit that we are satisfying a need - as opposed to sharing - which in "e-terms" can mean just clicking on a forward button.
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