There seems to be a renewed interest in developing knowledge strategies. We have been involved in three in the last six months and our narrative techniques have been well received. We now need to move people from seeing a knowledge strategy as a thing to a seeing it as a process. We also need to […]

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that every knowledge strategy has the same objectives, which are: improve knowledge sharing enhance innovation reduce impact of people leaving (knowledge retention) build skills and know-how improve everyone’s ability to find relevant knowledge when they need it improve how we learn from experience If […]

Have a look at this funny take on the recent election slogan adopted by the NSW Labor Party: “More to do, but we’re heading in the right direction” (hat tip to Victor Perton) Tags: slogans

Over the last few months we’ve talked about the importance of having a short phrase or mantra to help everyone in an organisation implement the company’s strategy (here and here). At Anecdote we’ve had a few catch phrases over our relatively short life and we’ve never been totally happy with any of them. Here’s the chronology: complexity […]

A while ago I argued that the target metaphor was inappropriate for change projects. The idea that anyone could accurately define a change target, aim at it, and then hit it with a well shot arrow was, at best, an illusion. In most cases the possible, beneficial end states are wide and varied. So the question is, how […]

Bruce Nussbaum over at BusinessWeek Online has written a short piece entitled: Lessons From Home Depot’s Bob Nardelli—Why Command And Control Is So Bad. Autocratic top-down, command and control works great when you focus on process—cost and quality. Six Sigma measures all that stuff wonderfully. The truth is that in the new global business culture, […]

I was working with Tony High before Christmas when he made the point to the group that ‘people don’t leave organisations, they leave managers’.  This is certainly consistent with my experience. Even if your job is fantastic, if your manager isn’t then thoughts inevitably turn to ‘what next’ and it’s a slippery slope once you […]

The previous blog contained some reflections on the considerable amout of knowledge strategy work we did in 2006. One of the things mentioned was the establishment of sets of principles (I’m not sure they are principles but it gets us into the right space) to help guide behaviours to improve knowledge sharing. The following list gives an idea of the […]

Anecdote has worked with some fantastic organisations over the past year and one of the main areas has been in developing knowledge strategies. I thought it timely to look back and reflect on some of the key learnings from these projects and some of these initial thoughts are captured in the bullet points below. Strategy […]

Christmas reading has help me stumble across two very different essays with the same theme: people are enormously influenced by their social ties. Anyone reading this blog won’t be surprised by that theme but these essays present two very different contexts. The first is called Knowing the Enemy by George Packer, which was recently published in the […]