Dave Pollard: My Weblog

THE STORIES BEHIND THREE GREAT INNOVATIONS

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 09:43:25 GMT

We are all by nature inventive, and ideas are cheap. The real challenge is innovation, bringing a great invention or idea to commercial fruition. It is the application of the idea that takes true genius, hard work, patience, timing, and often good luck and good connections. It is what separates the millionaire entrepreneur from the pauper inventor.

Here are three stories of innovation, each with a different lesson. While they are all product innovations (and most of us probably have all three products in our homes), the lessons apply equally to the innovation of services, business processes and operating technologies.

The story of the Weed Eater is a lesson in observation and application of science from one discipline to a completely different one, what de Bono famously calls lateral thinking.

In 1971, Texan George Ballas was looking for a better way to trim around the trees in his yard. One day, while going through an automatic car wash he observed how the bristles stood out straight as they spun around. Returning home, he punched some holes in a discarded popcorn tin, inserted knotted fishing line through the holes, and attached the contraption to his rotary electric edger. It worked so well he founded his own company, Weed Eater Inc. refined the product until it virtually sold itself in hardware stores nationwide, and finally sold out to Frigidaire Poulan, who still produce them by the million.

Note that Ballas did it all -- the lateral thinking invention, testing and refinement, finding financing and taking the personal risk of launching a new company. He didn't just patent the prototype and look for a buyer.

The story of the Swiffer Wet-Jet floor cleaner is a lesson in continuous improvement and adaptation within an enterprise. The concept of 'wipes' is not new -- those little packets of alcohol-imbued cloth for cleaning your fingers have been around for nearly a century. When consumer demand for convenience cleaning products rose in the 1980s, companies like Proctor & Gamble realized the opportunity they had to create new convenience products by combining every one of their cleaning products with a cloth applicator. On their web site they advised inventors not to bother sending them ideas for new 'wipe' products, and had a whole department developing and launching such products. The Swiffer Wet-Jet was a two-stage innovation. First they applied the absorbent cloth technology of their diapers to make a dry floor-cleaning cloth. When that was perfected they then added the liquid dispenser arm to the handle for wet cleaning as well. The collapsible handle allowed easy portability, and the old mop-and-pail was history. Now we look forward to the next innovation: washable, reusable cloths for this product so they don't clog our landfills.

P&G is constantly looking for other commercial opportunities to adapt technologies they already own and use. It's a lesson other businesses could learn from.

The story of Greenies, those funny green toothbrush-shaped pet treats, shows us that innovation often comes from observing and imitating nature. Veterinarian Joe Roetheli and his wife Judy had a Samoyed with terrible breath. They had observed that many dogs love to chew grass and other plants, and that the chlorophyll in plants is a natural breath-freshener. They combined the technology of existing hard dog treats designed to scrape tartar off dogs' teeth, with a chlorophyll-based breath freshener, and reduced the fat content, and the result was Greenies, a treat that's good for your dog, that sells out in pet food stores even at its outrageous price.

A lesson here is that innovation often results from the application of expertise to a pressing problem. If you're an innovator, make sure your wonderful product actually fills a perceived need, and stick to areas of discovery you have deep knowledge about.

More ideas on the process of innovation can be found in my Prescription for Business Innovation here , or in Peter Drucker's justifiably famous book Innovation and Entrepreneurship .

WHY INNOVATION HAPPENS IN WAVES

Sat, 31 May 2003 18:12:12 GMT

Two years ago, Elliott Ichimura, a colleague of mine, pulled together ideas from eight different sources to produce the Virtuous Cycle of Innovation shown above. The eight sources he used are:

Weird Ideas That Work - Robert Sutton
Leading the Revolution - Gary Hamel
The Sources of Innovation - Eric von Hippel
The Art of Innovation - Tom Kelley

Serious Play - Michael Schrage
The Circle of Innovation - Tom Peters
Business Dynamics - John Sterman
MIT Strategy course - Rebecca Henderson

At the time, the elegant inner cycle of entrepreneurship -> innovative ideas -> value creation -> cash flows -> incentives, primed by high leves of R&D investment, was still fueling many sectors of the economy.

What stopped the cycle, and why? I believe four structural, systemic and cultural factors, which were temporarily overcome during the exuberant 1990s, turned the virtuous circle back into a vicious cycle and led to the abandonment of innovation as a driver of the economy:

Short Term Focus: Businesses, especially public companies, are rewarded for short-term performance. The effect of this is to encourage actions that have positive bottom-line impact in the next fiscal quarter, even if their longer-term effect is negative. So in Elliott's chart, the arrow from profitable cash flows to investment (in innovation) was cut, as investment was shifted to activities with a more immediate payback.
Oligopoly: In many sectors of the economy, it is cheaper to buy (or buy off) innovation than to encourage it. When one or a few companies dominate the sector, they can corral all intellectual energies in the sector, locking up whole areas of intellectual property with massive numbers of broad patent applications, fiercely pursuing entrepreneurs who threaten this intellectual property, and buying off entrepreneurs they can't scare off, then shelving the ideas. In the chart, the oligopoly's cash flow converts the incentive for entrepreneurship into a dis-incentive for entrepreneurship.
Risk Aversion: The new age business thinkers of the '90s recognized that risk was a positive, an asset, rather than a negative. Some companies even exploiting this awareness, accepting and trading risk as a marketable commodity. Ironically, one of those was Enron. Cultural, this shift in thinking was unsustainable against our human aversion to risk. In the chart, the failure rate that was briefly considered a learning opportunity, began once again to be considered an unacceptable cost, and risks, even those that might have yielded huge opportunities, stopped being taken.
Change Aversion: Very few people really embrace change. It is threatening, creates anxiety, makes it harder to plan and predict. Business, like people, changes when it must. What we saw briefly in the 1990s was a flurry of what is called discontinuous change, the Innovator's Dilemma . There were so many innovations occurring that some of them, often accidentally or serendipitously, began to impact completely different sectors of the economy in unexpected ways. Miniaturization, laser and fibre optics technologies, and connectivity technologies had especially strong and broad impact on many businesses.

But as the number and pace of innovation slowed, due to the first three factors above, many businesses breathed a sigh of relief, shelved their e-business strategies and went back to business as usual. The reaction of the commercial entertainment industry to peer-to-peer networks (i.e. sue them and close them down, rather than adapting to them), is a perfect example. The rate of change in the business environment has notably slowed in recent years, and the recession has less to do with the slowdon than does basic human nature.

Will we see another virtuous cycle of innovation in the future? Undoubtedly. Even the most conservative businesses realize that a lack of innovation stifles the economy and leads to stagnation. Our change aversion is balanced against our entrepreneurial spirit. We like new ideas and trying out new things -- that is how we learn and grow. Eventually the pendulum will shift back, driven by a new set of basic human needs, and the virtuous cycle will shift back into gear.

SOCIAL NETWORKING, SOCIAL SOFTWARE AND THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Wed, 28 May 2003 11:41:31 GMT

I've been trading comments and e-mails with Gary Lawrence Murphy at Teledyn about the current craze over Social Software and Network Enablement, and how that plays into the current sorry state of Knowledge Management. A big problem with KM is that, like the six blind men feeling different parts of the elephant, the term has come to mean many different things to different people, and hence nothing at all:

Academics: KM is anything that allows us to do something better in business than we can do without it
Consultants: KM is an aspect of business process improvement
IT People: KM is any software that concerns itself at least vaguely with databases or content management systems
Librarians: KM is the new name for what special librarians have always done
HR People: KM is the process surrounding non-classroom learning curricula

In most organizations KM is epitomized by the corporate intranet, the extranet, community-of-practice tools, sales force automation tools, customer relationship management tools, data mining tools, decision support tools, databases purchased from outside vendors, and sometimes business research and analysis. In other words, it's certain specialized technologies and information processing roles, with a thin wrapper of 'knowledge creating' and 'knowledge-sharing' processes.

Most of the organizations that have implemented KM bemoan their people's inability to find stuff, the lack of demonstrable productivity improvement, the complexity of the technology, and the absence of significant reusable 'best practice' content.

Now along comes Social Networking and Social Software, also with its adherents from academia, consultancies, and IT. Beneath the torrent of hype and theory, it may reveal an important truth about KM, business, and how we learn: Social networks can provide the essential context needed to make knowledge sharing possible, valuable, efficient and effective .

What are 'social networks'? They are the circles in which we make a living and connect with other people. They transcend strict delineation between personal and business (there's often overlap between the two). They transcend organizational boundaries and hierarchies (we often trust and share more with people outside our companies, and outside our business units, than those inside, and often get better value from the exchange to boot). We are beginning to suspect that the essential yet elusive lesson of the PC is also the essential lesson for KM: It's all about portability and connectivity, not about processing power or content.

If we were to 'reinvent' KM as, say, Social Network Enablement , what would change?

Intranet as connector and link harvester: The intranet would become a people-to-people connector instead of a content repository. It would become a 'link harvester', scanning all traffic across it and dynamically identifying connections to people and their knowledge. New tools would be needed to allow such functionality.
Decentralized content, with blog as surrogate for the individual: Content would shift from centralized, shared databases to personally- or team-owned databases, journals and stories, where the owner(s) provide essential context. (See my post on The Weblog as Filing Cabinet ). Each individual's subscribable, personally-indexed Weblog would be a surrogate for the individual when s/he's not available personally.
Decentralized security, organizational boundaries blurred: Organizational boundaries become irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether the person you are sharing with is a work colleague, a supplier, customer, friend or advisor, an individual or a team, inside or outside the company. You share what you know with those you trust, the same way regardless. Security would be provided at the individual level, not managed by the enterprise. The same way employees know what hard-copy documents can be shared with whom, they set up subscription access to their blog categories correspondingly.
Greatly enhanced weblog functionality, emphasis on access: Today's blogs are not nearly enough to fully enable social networks. They need much more connectivity functionality. A user should be able to call up a visual of their own network, or the network of expertise corresponding to a particular subject. The tool that does this would operate much like a search engine except it would retrieve people (and links to people) instead of documents. It would also have to aggregate various means of access to those people: e-mail, voice-mail, video and whiteboard, meeting scheduling, IM, weblog subscriptions and commenting, and new means of access just being developed. And it would need some mechanism to create a 'biography' of the user by automatically summarizing the total content of their weblog.
Enhanced organizational change functionality: The exhaust from the increased connectivity could be browsed and canvassed to identify organizational change opportunities. Popularity indexes could pre-sage emerging business issues needing management attention, and could be used as a key part of the performance evaluation and reward process, and to identify de facto organizational thought leaders and potential strong recruits. It could incorporate Tipping Point functionality to propagate important ideas, Power Law analysis to identify and spell employees suffering from 'network overload' , and perhaps even new "Network Traffic Analyses" to identify communication logjams and disconnects. Intriguing, and perhaps a bit scary.

Four important unanswered questions:

What role can Social Network Enablement and social software play in enhancing individual and organizational learning?
How do you measure and reward contributions to a network (a) by full-time knowledge workers (people in the organization, like researchers and help desk staff whose sole value is contributing to the network) and (b) by network 'players' outside the organization?
How do organizations equip and foster networks without unduly controlling their actions and membership and therefore crushing them?
How do we capture summaries and abstracts of organizational conversations that occur in other than written form (voice-mail, teleconferences and meetings), so that the blog record of networks is complete?

SOCIAL NETWORKING ENABLEMENT IN ACTION: AN EXAMPLE

The diagram at the top of this post is repeated below, to save scrolling.

Suppose you are the person in the lower right corner of this chart, the CFO of Company Y, and you need to find out about a proposed change to the tax code for Research Tax Credits. Before Social Network Enablement (SNE), you would have typed the term into the intranet search engine, checked the public IRS website or some purchased tax service your company buys, or just picked up the phone and called Jan, your accountant who works for Company X. Alas, Jan just left on a three-week vacation.

Since you've implemented SNE, however, everything gets easier. You key the term into your Expertise Finder and up pops the picture below. As you expected, Jan appears (the person depicted at the bottom of the Company X oval) but that's just the start. This Expertise Network diagram shows only the experts and connections related specifically to the subject of Research Tax Credits. It tells you that the R&D department of your company has some information on tax credits on their team blog, which they've posted to the R&D Community of Practice intranet site. It also tells you that Jan has access to this intranet site, and that this intranet site subscribes to Jan's Tax Credit blog category. It also identifies two other people at the accounting firm that have expertise on this topic, since Jan is unavailable, and a customer of both your company and your accountant, who outsources his R&D to your company and qualifies for a 'flow-through' of the Research Tax Credit and hence is very knowledgeable about how these credits work. And a supplier who sells a Tax Credit Analyzer to your accountants, and a tax credit expert advisor to your accountants who, it turns out, went to high school with you and might cough up the knowledge you want for free, are also identified.

So you have lots of alternatives. In Jan's absence you can phone or e-mail or IM any of six other identified experts, or subscribe to their blogs, or buy the Tax Credit Analyzer yourself (knowing your accountants thought it good enough to buy), or tap into the R&D group's CoP tool or the accountants' extranet. Problem solved.

CAN TECHNOLOGY HELP YOU THINK?

Sun, 11 May 2003 19:03:15 GMT

There is a growing category of software tools designed to help you think better. Whether they help depends both on how you think and on why you think (i.e. whether you're analyzing or imagining). Probably the best known thinking tool is Peter Senge's systems thinking methodology. Basically cause-and-effect diagrams, they help turn negative reinforcing actions (vicious cycles) into positive ones (virtuous cycles). Here's an illustration of the tragedy of the commons that is leading Bush to want to privatize everything, in systems thinking, from Outsights :

You can buy Stella and ithink systems thinking software. I used this process to diagram the positive reinforcement of the 17 Projects in my How to Save the World proposal, and again in my analysis of depression .

A second category of thinking tools might be defined as deconstructing tools. They take an idea or an objective and decompose it into its elements or aspects. Here's an example of its use by Matt Mower to analyze the process of knowledge capture, using MindManager software:

There are many other tools that help you organize your thoughts, and hence at least indirectly think better. These include critical path and GANTT charts, and a variety of scheduling, system design and project management tools. There are software versions of many of these tools.

Some bloggers have developed tools that work in connection with their blogs to help them find relevant information and inspiration. Here's AugustDiva's links for thinking . I think it's a great improvement over blogrolls.

How about right-brain, creative processes? Creative thinking gurus like De Bono and Michalko use models and exercises like Six Thinking Hats and Thinkertoys to stimulate the imagination, and perhaps remove blockages from creative thinking. It's a matter of opinion whether the creative process lends itself to processes (and hence software tools) as rigorous as those for the analytical processes.

What do you think? Do you use any of these tools, and do they actually help you think better?

COULD PURPLE COWS REVIVE KM?

Fri, 09 May 2003 04:23:46 GMT

Fast Company's Seth Godin is writing about purple cows . What's a purple cow? Something that is remarkable, worth talking about, worth paying attention to, something that stands out compared to "perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows". Here's an example that Schindler Elevator came up with:

When you approach their new elevators, you key in your floor on a centralized control panel. In return, the panel tells you which elevator is going to take you to your floor. With this simple presort, Schindler Elevator Corporation has managed to turn every elevator into an express. Your elevator takes you immediately to the 12th floor and races back to the lobby. This means that buildings can be taller, they need fewer elevators for a given density of people, the wait is shorter, and the building can use precious space for people rather than for elevators. A huge win, implemented at a remarkably low cost.

Matt Mower of Curiouser and Curiouser thinks Knowledge Management (KM) needs a purple cow, a product, concept or innovation as remarkable in its way as Schindler's presorting elevator. He suggests KM is moribund, and says "the whole field of KM is dominated by the idea of being good enough". Matt is talking specifically about KM products, but what he says is true of the whole, newly-boring field of KM. Five years ago, six of the top ten best-selling business books were about KM, and the field was hot: today none of them are. KM gurus are blaming the economy, the unfortunate name "knowledge management", and each other for the sad state of the discipline. But the simple truth is, nothing remarkable and implementable has emerged in KM in years.

If a purple KM cow could revive the discipline before it goes the way of TQM and BPR, where could we find one? Seth suggests ten ways to raise a purple cow:

Find the customer group that's most profitable, or most likely to influence other customers. Figure out how to develop for, advertise to, or reward either group.
Launch a product that does nothing but appeal to, and let you dominate, one underserved market niche.
Create two teams: the inventors and the milkers. Put them in separate buildings. Hold a formal ceremony when you move a product from one group to the other. Celebrate them both, and rotate people around.
Get the email addresses of the 20% of your customer base that loves what you do, and make something extraordinary for them.
Remarkable isn't always about changing your #1 product. It can be the way you answer the phone, launch a new brand, or price a product.
Test the limits. Ask what it would take to be the cheapest, the fastest, the easiest, the most efficient, the most x.
Think of the smallest conceivable market and describe a product that overwhelms it with its remarkability. Go from there.
Find things that are "just not done" in your industry, and then go ahead and do them.
Ask, "Why not?" Almost everything you don't do has no good reason for it.
Ask what would happen if you simply told the absolute truth inside your company and to your customers?

Think about the different aspects of KM in your organization: intranets, extranets, communities of practice, external database purchases, research, push/pull distribution. Think about the internal and external customer segments for each aspect, and how the ten ways above might apply to create a product, a process, or a tool for one or more segments that is really remarkable.

I've pulled together a few possible purple KM cows from discussion with a couple of front-line KM practitioners. I'll share them here next Friday.

TO VISITORS FROM DAVID GURTEEN'S KNOWLEDGE LETTER

Thu, 08 May 2003 03:14:33 GMT

I'd like to thank David Gurteen for mentioning me in his e-newsletter, as over 200 of his readers have visited as a result. I'd appreciate your comments on my weblog or any of its articles. For Knowledge Letter readers who are unfamiliar with 'blogs', you can reply in two ways: by clicking on the 'Comments' button beneath this or any post, or by clicking on the envelope icon in bottom left to send me an e-mail. Welcome!

BLOGS IN BUSINESS (PART 3): FINDING THE RIGHT NICHE

Fri, 02 May 2003 13:28:41 GMT

Even businesses with well-established knowledge management systems can find room for weblogs, and derive great benefits from integrating them into their existing KM architecture. This article summarizes a presentation I'm giving next week to the Conference Board on "Blogs in Business".

In two previous posts, The Weblog as Filing Cabinet and A Weblog-Based Content Architecture for Business , I proposed that business weblogs could be used to codify and 'publish', in a completely voluntary and personal manner, the individual worker's entire 'filing cabinet', and outlined how a company's content architecture could be built around blogs. In this article, I suggest a process for integrating weblogs profitably and productively into companies that already have well-established knowledge management systems.

Defining the Need
Here are the six knowledge problems that you most often hear voiced in businesses with substantial, conventional KM systems:

You're still hoarding: More knowledge is needed, can't be bought, and isn't being voluntarily contributed by the company's experts.
It's out of date: A shortage of current, accurate knowledge is exposing the company to unacceptable risk.
We don't know what this means: More background or context is needed to make the knowledge in the company's intranet useful.
What have you shared this year?: A more formal process is needed to assess individuals' contribution to knowledge-sharing.
We needed it over here: Employees aren't sharing what they know beyond their immediate business circle.
We couldn't find it: Knowledge isn't getting to the people who urgently need it to make management decisions or succesful sales presentations.

Articulating the Value Proposition
The consequences of these problems are the kind that keep CEOs awake at night: Lost revenue opportunities, a dearth of innovation , foundering productivity, dissatisfied customers, disgruntled employees, and lost learning opportunities. Therefore weblogs can be effectively pitched to senior management of major organizations by explaining how they help solve the six problems:

They make contributing knowledge simpler, easier, and more automatic
They make it easier to update knowledge on a timely basis
They make knowledge more context rich
They allow the authors of key business knowledge to build and retain 'pride of ownership'
They make contributing knowledge more fun, since it becomes more like 'publishing'
Each individual's 'collection' of shared knowledge is easy to define and assess at performance evaluation time
They make knowledge easier to route, to 'subscribe' to, to canvass and to 'mine'

Finding the Right Niche
The first step in capitalizing on these benefits is to decide where and how weblogs can best contribute to knowledge management in your organization. The knowledge process has five steps, shown in the diagram below.

Two of the gurus of KM, Japan's Drs. Nonaka & Takeuchi, define the four blue and green steps in this process as the Knowledge Creation Cycle : Knowledge is 'codified' by putting it in written form, enhanced by synthesis, analysis and repurposing, internalized by the readers that learn from it, and shared peer-to-peer on the job. People participate in some or all of the five steps, sometimes in multiple roles within an organization, illustrated by the eleven figures in this diagram.

Knowledge managers can determine where weblogs best fit in their organizations by answering three questions:

Which of the six knowledge problems listed above are critically affecting the company?
Which of the five knowledge process steps are adversely affected by these problems?
Which roles of the organization are sub-optimized because of these problems?

For example, you might determine that expert knowledge is being hoarded by the company's specialists in institutional sales, and that as a result new sales staff are unable to learn how to manage these critical accounts.

From this exercise you can derive a list of people in the organization who would most likely benefit the organization by using weblogs. That list could well include community of practice coordinators, subject matter specialists, internal newsletter publishers, and selected others in the organization whose 'filing cabinet' contents are most coveted by others. It will be different in every company.

Implementation and Training
Each person selected to have a weblog then needs to be trained how to set up and use the tool. This entails:

Setting up the weblog's personal taxonomy (categories) corresponding to their filing cabinet tabs or 'My Documents' folders
Setting up the weblog's 'permanent files': documents that are regularly and repeatedly used such as contact lists and policy documents
Setting up the weblog's links, directories, and subscriptions
Helping the weblog owner decide on appropriate publishing decision rules : what knowledge (reports, analyses etc,) he/she will be expected to create, what knowledge from other sources he/she will be expected to propagate, and who will be permitted or required to access or subscribe to which weblog categories
Helping the weblog owner decide explicitly what doesn't get published, to avoid confidentiality risks, intellectual property law violations, and information overload
Training the weblog owner to pause each time he/she saves or sends a document, link, or message, and decide whether to publish it to the weblog at the same time, using the agreed-upon decision rules
Possibly teaching the weblog owner how to create document abstracts, how to properly categorize posts, and how to notify potentially interested users of a post who aren't already subscribed

The Five Obstacles
I forsee five major obstacles to the successful introduction of weblogs into large organizations:

HTML / Microsoft format conversion. Most large companies use MS Office as their principal document standard, and the conversion of Office documents to HTML remains a bloated and untidy process.
Authoring rights: Decisions need to be made about who can post to each weblog, and about the potential use of 'group' weblogs, which in many organizations will be political.
Proprietary macros: Existing commercial weblog software is too complex and techy for the average business user, so customization will be needed to keep weblog maintenance as simple as possible for neophyte users.
Intermediation: Many business executives will want to delegate responsibility for their weblog to an administrative assistant or knowledge steward, which may complicate the process and dilute the benefit of using weblogs.
New knowledge behaviours: Weblog owners will need to learn to develop and use appropriate publishing decision criteria and how to abstract and categorize the knowledge they produce. It's no longer just their filing cabinet.

The key to success is to pick the spots in your organization where weblogs can solve pressing business problems, make a compelling case for their use, ensure the weblog owners are properly trained, and anticipate and deal with obstacles in advance. Given the enormous potential of weblogs to realize some of the long-awaited benefits of knowledge management, this should be well worth the effort.

CAUTION TO READERS - THIS IS NOT A REAL BLOG

Fri, 11 Apr 2003 02:14:42 GMT

For those that may have been attracted here from the Recently Updated list, or by the disarmingly innocuous name of this blog, please note that this is just a mock-up for purposes of demonstrating how a weblog-based content architecture could work in business. The links at right are all for illustration only and don't work. To give it some actual content I'm also using it as a mirror site for the business posts on my regular, real Weblog, which is here .

MAKING 'COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE' WORK

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 17:08:42 GMT

In our company, we've been supporting Communities of Practice (CoPs) as a key enabler for Knowledge Management for almost a decade, and we've developed a model and some operating principles that seem to work well. I was honoured that my paper on Re-Intermediation was selected as Library Site of the Day yesterday, and thought I would return the favour by sharing some of these principles with readers.

There are three main types of CoPs, shown in the table below. All three share know-how (expertise), know-what (intelligence) and know-who (contacts), using electronic tools and databases to supplement face-to-face meetings, to accomplish set objectives:

	Life	Purpose
Shared-Problem Communities	Indefinite	Implement Solutions, then Continuously Improve
Shared-Project Communities	Finite	Manage the Project
Shared-Interest Communities	Indefinite	Share Knowledge and Viewpoints

In many organizations, the majority of communities are focused on shared problems, such as the achievement of sales targets, bringing a new product to market, or improving the quality or efficiency of manufacturing or distribution.

Most successful CoPs have clearly defined goals, roles, and processes. The goals depend on the purpose of the CoP (see above) and on the specific mandate set by the organization's, project's, or community's leaders. Goals may evolve over time, but they should be clearly articulated.

Roles depend on the size and scope of the community, but most successful CoPs define at least six essential and distinct roles for community members and the organizational teams that support them:

The Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are the acknowledged leaders of the community. They are responsible for ensuring that it achieves its purpose, and that community members have the knowledge they want and need to fulfil their roles.
The Core Community members are those that 'wake up worrying' about the goals of the community and are measured and rewarded on the achievement of these goals. They generally have 'author/editor access' to the community tools and databases.
The Extended Community consists of others with a stake in achieving the goals of the community, and those that provide critical knowledge or expertise necessary to its success, but who are not involved with it on a day-to-day basis.
Knowledge Stewards or Content Coordinators are responsible for assessing the knowledge content needs of the community and ensuring that knowledge is captured in the community tools and databases, often acting as intermediaries for the SMEs to that end.
Researchers are those charged with collecting or creating the knowledge content to fill any gaps in it identified by the Stewards.
Network Coordinators or CoP Facilitators are responsible for optimizing the flow of knowledge to and from community members. This entails arranging community meetings, canvassing community members, assigning work to researchers etc.

It is important that community members understand their, and others', roles, and that they receive the necessary training, budget, and other resources to fulfil them. It is equally important that clear success measures for each role, leading to the achievement of the community goals, be articulated, and that those in each role be rewarded or recognized for attaining these measures.

The community must then decide on its operating processes, its modus operandi. Like goals, processes will evolve, but they need to be defined to ensure cohesion of effort towards the community's goals. In shared-project communities, the processes will often be explicitly set out in the project plan or charter. In shared-problem communities, process decisions will include how, and how often, the community will meet, and how its work will be apportioned and carried out: who will do what by when.

Intranets and other new technologies now allow communities to use a variety of tools and databases in a shared electronic workspace, to further the achievement of their goals. Here are the most common types of these I've seen:

Tool/Database	Purpose
Library databases, including: - Harvesting, publishing or submission tools - Indexing, taxonomy and search tools - Distribution and subscription tools	Store the accumulated knowledge (content and links) of the community - Capture requisite knowledge - Locate relevant knowledge easily - Deploy relevant knowledge to the community
Discussion databases	Record and store community 'conversations'
IM or chat tools	Enable instant access to community members
Collaboration tools and e-spaces	Enable virtual teamwork on specific tasks
Demonstration, expert and learning tools	Enable on-line learning by the community
Canvassing tools	Enable just-in-time information acquisition
Event calendars	Coordinate community activities
Community directories	Identify and reach community members and their expertise

Project communities often use additional tools from the project manager's toolkit.

Finally, here are the ten organizational and operating principles that seem to lead to highly effective and efficient communities of practice:

Let CoPs organize themselves. Don't impose organization on them. They know how to do it.
Let CoPs manage themselves. Involvement of people in communities is largely voluntary, whether the boss likes it that way or not, and nothing kills a voluntary organization faster than someone outside telling the members what to do and how to do it.
Content quality is critical. The quality of the knowledge and expertise that is made available to community members will keep drawing community members back and keep them involved and engaged.
Keep it simple. Don't make the tools so powerful and complex that they intimidate the extended community members.
Keep it fresh. Just like with a Weblog, you need something new and interesting everyday to keep the community energized and momentum high.
It's the people, stupid. Don't get so enamoured with tools and databases and processes that you forget that human interaction is the most valuable and most important mechanism for knowledge transfer.
If it's dying, pull the plug. 'Indefinite' life for a community doesn't mean 'infinite'. If enthusiasm and engagement in community activities is flagging, figure out why, extinguish the 'old' community, and if there is still a critical problem, project or shared interest there somewhere, self-organize a new community around that.
Understand members' knowledge behaviours. Some people insist on doing everything face-to-face. Others love working with virtual tools. Still others want relevant community knowledge pushed out to them. Accommodate them, don't try to change them.
Make sure the network coordinator is a star. He or she plays the pivotal role in the community, connecting people to people and people to knowledge. That takes enormous people skills, exceptional energy, and a solid knowledge of the subject matter.
Have fun. If the community is fun to be part of, members will put up with lots of other imperfections as you get the kinks worked out.

WHY COMPLEX INTRANETS DON'T WORK AND 'LIBRARIANS' DO: RE-INTERMEDIATION

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 16:45:17 GMT

Part of the job of a Chief Knowledge Officer is to understand the knowledge culture, the collective knowledge behaviours, of the organization you work for. A phenomenon I have observed over the past decade is that such behaviours tend to evolve as the employees learn more, and as the tools available for learning and research become more complex.

In the typical company, roughly 20% of employees have a 'self-service' knowledge culture. They do their own research using both the intranet and the public Internet, and do their own analysis of what that research tells them. At the other end of the spectrum, another 20% (generally older, more senior employees) have what I call an 'intermediated' knowledge culture. They assign subordinates to do both the research (the accessing and distilling of relevant knowledge) and the analysis (interpretation and reporting of its meaning) for them. The remaining 60% fall in between, usually preferring a librarian, subordinate or administrative assistant to do the research, but putting their own spin on the results and packaging it themselves.

When people join a company right out of university, they usually eagerly join the 'self-service' knowledge user constituency. The people retiring tend to be 'intermediated' knowledge users. These two trends comprise the phenomenon called dis-intermediation. You would expect therefore that, over time, the curve above would shift to the left. However, what I've observed is that as young employees move up the ranks, and the opportunity-cost of their time increases, they move quite quickly to the middle category and ultimately, if they trust their subordinates, to the 'intermediated' category. As a result of this tendency, which I call re-intermediation, there is a remarkable equilibrium of knowledge behaviours in most companies.

In the decade since their invention, intranets have generally become much more sophisticated, with the addition of advanced search tools, portals, community-of-practice spaces and collaboration tools. Much of this sophistication has been added at the behest of 'self-service' knowledge users. But as they become 'intermediated' users, we have observed that the administrative staff assigned to do research find some of these tools too complex. This leads to two unexpected results: disuse of some of the more powerful intranet tools, and an acceleration of the rate at which the less tech-savvy new employees (overwhelmed by the complexity of the intranet) move to the middle category.

Aggravating the situation, while the ability of employees to leverage knowledge leads to an increase in revenue per employee, it also prompts a reduction in proportionate intake of new recruits, and hence a reduction in the company's leverage (the ratio of junior to senior employees). And, in an effort to monetize the value of this leverage, many firms reduce the administrative/professional staff ratio, expecting that self-service productivity tools should enable professionals to get by with fewer administrative assistants.

Can you see what this is does to the overall dynamic of the knowledge culture? The scarce but overworked administrative assistants can quickly learn the power of the more complex intranet tools, but because they are not professionals themselves, nor directly involved in the task that the research is wanted for, lack the context to be able to make effective use of some of these tools: Like the librarians of old, they know what knowledge is wanted but not why. At the same time, the few new recruits see an incredible opportunity to become indispensible knowledge gurus in the organization, and clamour for even more sophisticated and complex tools to improve their productivity. But then, as they quickly advance, they shift to the middle category and leave the burden of basic research to others.

And that isn't the end of it. The middle-category and 'intermediated' knowledge users now start to become dissatisfied with the quality of the research they are receiving from overworked, context-deprived assistants. These dissatisfied users try to reassume responsibility for their own research, but often find the tools, with which they are no longer familiar, too complex to do so.

A solution to this is to re-intermediate: employ full-time specialized researchers with sufficient business knowledge to understand the context of user requests. They can quickly become 'power' users of the complex intranet tools they have at their disposal.

But this isn't the 'self-service' model that many businesses had expected would result from the knowledge economy. It's actually remarkably similar to the old intermediated knowledge model of hard-copy libraries staffed by generalist librarians. Under such a model, relatively few intermediaries become the prime users of the intranet (just as they were the prime users of the hard-copy libraries). Even with some dissatisfied senior employees re-learning how to do their own research, the ranks of the 'self-service' intranet users are unlikely to exceed the 20% level of the heyday a decade ago. To some extent, knowledge culture has come full-circle.

It's an interesting dynamic, and one that will undoubtedly continue to change, and challenge the ingenuity of intranet designers and managers for years to come.

A WEBLOG-BASED CONTENT ARCHITECTURE FOR BUSINESS

Sun, 23 Mar 2003 22:26:44 GMT

In a previous post, The Weblog as Filing Cabinet, I proposed that business weblogs could be used to codify and 'publish', in a completely voluntary and personal manner, the individual worker's entire filing cabinet. The key advantage of providing such a capability is vastly increased access to, and sharing of, a company's knowledge. This post outlines a content architecture that could enable this to occur.

This architecture would have two principal components: The Enterprise Content Architecture and the Desktop Content Architecture, which are illustrated below.

The Enterprise Content Architecture would operate as follows:

Rather than using a document submission process or enabling automated knowledge harvesting, as occurs in many organizations today, the individual would simply post to his or her personal weblog all of the documents that would normally be placed in the individual's filing cabinet or saved to the My Documents or Sent E-mails folder.
An enterprise-wide interface would be developed to index and publish each individual's posts to the company's Intranet. This interface would allow posting of entire documents, or just document titles or links, and would allow the user to specify whether each post could be viewed by anyone in the company, or selected communities only, or (for confidential information) no one at all.
The Intranet would then archive all posts by account, project and/or subject, using the enterprise's taxonomy or an automated taxonomization tool. Newsfeeds and articles purchased from external vendors could be similarly archived.
The individual employee would be able to extract knowledge from the Intranet using a variety of tools:

By subject, using a browsable table of contents or catalogue
By keyword, using a search engine
By subscription to any additions to documents on a particular account, project or subject
By subscription to any additions to another person's weblog
By subscription to any additions in a specific category on the weblog of any person in a specified community.

The knowledge culture change program of the company could be simplied to "Publish Your Filing Cabinet".

The Desktop Content Architecture would operate as follows (many commercial weblog tools offer this functionality):

The employee would author or amend documents, e-mails etc. using an HTML-capable text/document processor (most commercial weblog tools include one, and allow simple posting from most other processors).
Rather than Saving to File or Sending documents, the employee would Post each document to his or her weblog. If necessary, documents could be indexed by the company's taxonomy, and access restrictions specified, at the moment of posting.
The employee would access knowledge from the Intranet, Extranet, Internet, peers and external vendors from his or her weblog home page, using any of the following tools:

Table of Contents of the individual's weblog, or the enterprise-wide Intranet (browsing)
Search Engine to search the individual's weblog, the enterprise-wide Intranet, the public Internet, or the pertinent categories of all the weblogs of a particular community
The News Aggregator for automatic feeds of external vendor and public Internet news, publications, others' weblogs and new posts to the Intranet on specific subjects, to which the employee has 'subscribed'
The BlogRoll, to link directly to others' weblogs or send an e-mail to canvass others in one's community

The fundamental difference between this and traditional enterprise-wide content architectures, is that knowledge under this model resides with and is controlled by the individual. The knowledge of the community is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of the community members (within any shared categorizations the community members decide to establish, and pushed to other community members by the weblog's 'subscription' functionality. The knowledge of the enterprise is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of all employees, made accessible through the weblog's publishing and subscription functionality, using the tools present in the weblog itself. Theoretically, depending on the robustness of the company's networks, the Intranet could be slimmed down to nothing more than a set of organized links, with no actual 'content' whatsoever.

Each employee thus defines his or her own taxonomy (the same way each employee currently decides how to organize and index his or her own filing cabinet and My Documents folder). Each employee defines his or her own communities (by who is included in the BlogRoll), so communities truly become self-organizing and self-managed.

Culturally, these two features of a weblog-based content architecture are hugely advantageous, because they turn control over the management and sharing of knowledge to individual employees, allowing them to organize knowledge in accordance with their personal mental models (the way they think and learn), and allowing them to retain pride in and responsibility of ownership of their personal knowledge 'stocks'.

The advantages of this architecture are therefore:

Much more knowledge is codified and available for sharing (including sharing with customers via Extranets)
Knowledge is kept more current and complete
The context of knowledge is more apparent and hence richer
Knowledge is easier to find
Less centralized Intranet management and technology is needed
Evaluation of individuals' contribution to organizational knowledge is easier to gauge
Less effort is needed to persuade individuals to share knowledge
Communities of practice can develop spontaneously and flexibly
Peer-to-peer knowledge transfer (the most valuable kind in most organizations) is facilitated, and new knowledge is automatically 'pushed' to 'subscribers' on a timely basis

As weblog tools become more powerful and flexible, open sourcing of weblog add-ons increases, and RSS and XML technologies advance and become standard, the justification for migrating centralized knowledge management systems to a weblog-based architecture will grow more compelling. In the meantime, leading-edge knowledge organizations need to be piloting and experimenting with such architectures, if they don't wish to be left behind.

REINVENTING 'KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT' : PART ONE

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 07:40:04 GMT

The field of Knowledge Management (KM) has existed for about a decade, and after an initial flurry of enthusiasm (at one point six of the top ten business best-sellers were about KM) it has fallen into disarray. Part of the problem is that the field has been dominated by three largely disconnected groups:

Academics & business gurus, who write about theory that is too general and abstract to have much practical application,
Knowledge managers and project managers who cobble together pragmatic custom applications, often in an undisciplined and unsustainable way, applications that are often abandoned as needs, roles and technologies change, and
IT managers who, with the best of intentions, buy and install commercial 'KM tools' that never get much front-line take-up

Ten years later many organizations have little to show for large investments in promising KM tools, projects and infrastructure. What went wrong, and is it too late to save KM from the scrap heap of failed management fads?

I believe one cause of the failure of KM was the attempt to build generalized tools that were expected to have application in almost all industries and business processes. Such tools work well enough in the old financial information (FIS), sales and marketing (SMIS) and human resources (HRIS) systems. In these 'classical' IT systems, both the content (financial, customer and employee data) and the application (financial statements, customer reports and employee records) are relatively standard across a wide variety of industries.

By contrast, knowledge content (like leading practices, industry analyses and methodologies) is particular to each industry and to each department and process within a company. Here are four examples to illustrate this:

	Example of Content	Example of Process
R&D process in a pharma company	patent for a new drug	drug development
Sales process in a consultancy	customer analysis	selling an assignment
Production process in a newspaper	article or editorial	intelligence gathering, editing
Distribution process in a newspaper	newspaper edition	publishing

A knowledge tool designed for one of the above processes is unlikely to be optimal for another process, any more than a machine designed to make lasers would be optimal for blending fruit. And there are three additional dimensions to the problem that complicate matters further:

There are four steps in the knowledge/learning cycle:

Capturing: e.g. putting it in a memo, filing cabinet or Windows folder
Manipulating: e.g. repurposing, reapplying, or reorganizing it
Learning: e.g. internalizing someone else's knowledge, reading, taking courses, OJT
Sharing: e.g. conversations in various media and forums to exchange knowledge

There are three ways to improve the 'knowledge culture' of an organization (see diagram at top of this article)

Develop or improve tools which enforce standard processes which, in turn drive effective employee behaviour,
Develop, teach and inculcate processes that drive effective employee behaviour, and
Directly address effective employee behaviour by training, reward systems, communication etc.

There are three distinct types of knowledge in orgaqnizations:

Intelligence, also known as 'explicit' knowledge or ' know-what' (such as the four content examples in the chart above)
Expertise, also known as 'tacit' knowledge or 'know-how '
Networks, contacts, relationships and 'know-who'

In its full complexity, this can lead to knowledge problems as diverse as these:

How can a pharmaceutical company capture patent information more effectively to reduce drug development costs
How can a consultancy's intern learn the expert's know-how about, for example, selling assignments to CIOs
How can a newspaper repurpose archived articles and editorials to provide readers with better context for today's news

It is naive to believe any small group of standardized 'KM tools' could optimally solve such diverse knowledge problems right out of the box. So, if a tool is to be part of the solution at all, it must be highly specialized or customized to provide the precise functionality needed to solve the problem, without awkward or extraneous features. That is not to say that commercial tools could not provide a starting point for the design of an appropriate solution.

From the above, a six-step process for knowledge-based performance improvement can be inferred, which might provide the basis for a more flexible and sustainable framework for a new business discipline than KM has proven to be:

Start with the Problem: Identify the specific productivity, revenue generation, customer satisfaction, learning, or decision-making (these being the five value propositions for KM) problems in each business unit of your company, that are caused at least in part by lack of, or barriers to, exchange of knowledge.
Set Targets: Identify specific, realistic 'success' metrics, that tie directly to improvements in one or more of the above value propositions; set a current state benchmark and a target benchmark for each metric.
Decide on a Solution Set: Determine which combination of tools, process improvements and behaviour change programs (training etc.) will optimally solve each problem and attain the target benchmarks.
Create Tools: If tools are part of the solution set, decide whether to buy and modify, or build, these tools. Don't expect tools 'out of the box' to work effectively. Don't buy any tool, no matter how cheap or elegant, that doesn't solve an acknowledged business problem in your organization.
Invest in the Solutions: Decide whether a one-time project will achieve the target benchmarks, or whether an ongoing investment in infrastructure is needed to sustain improved performance. Make the investment.
Implement: Implement, measure, continuously improve, or, if they no longer work, obsolesce the solutions and start again.

Bottom line: Forget all the jargon and theory of KM. Be skeptical about most 'KM' tools on the market. Start with your business problems, not the features and benefits of proffered solutions. Knowledge tools, processes and programs are just means to a business end.

The author has been Chief Knowledge Officer of a large multinational organization since 1994. In Part 2, he will provide a Case Study applying the above methodology.

LIFE SKILLS

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 08:57:40 GMT

We've just been through another exercise at work to help us identify our, and our employees', skills, and how to improve them. There are a mass of these, from What Color is Your Parachute to Do What You Are . For a quarter century, in both hiring and assessing performance of staff, I've used a simpler model that's evolved over time. It says every job (and perhaps every task in life) requires some combination of four groups of skills:

Creative Skills

Ideation: Coming up with new ideas [CI]
Representation/Spacial Skills: Capturing, applying and executing these ideas [CR]

Language Skills

Written Communication [LW]
Oral Communication [LO]
Non-Verbal Communication [LN]

Knowledge Processing Skills

Synthesis: Distilling and summarizing information [KS]
Analysis: Breaking down information [KA]
Interpretation: Determining what information means; adding insight [KI]

Interpersonal Skills

Sensing: Listening and appreciation [IS]
Connecting: Engaging, sympathizing and relating [IC]
Persuading [IP]

So how do you use this? You map the skills you have against the skills you need for your job, like I have done in the scatter chart in the upper right. If most of the dots are in the upper right and lower left cells, your skills are well aligned with your job: You're probably doing well and are happy at work. If most of the dots are in the upper left cell, you're probably over your head, or at least struggling. Success will depend on how many of the dots you can move over to the right (by honing your skills). If most of the dots are in the lower right cell, you're probably bored out of your mind. Your skills are not getting exercised, and it's doubtful you'll be happy in your current job. Better hope you like the people you work with. When I've done this exercise with my staff, I usually find at least five of the eleven dots in this quartile, so I'm not at all surprised that most people are unhappy with their jobs.

You can use this method to assess your affinity for a hobby (like blogging) as well. I tried this myself, and it told me to keep my day job.

I'm currently exploring how this skills model could be applied in some rather unorthodox ways:

Comparing skills of humans with those of animals ( ravens make especially interesting subjects) to assess animal intelligence, which I believe is wildly under-estimated.
Exploring the relationship between instincts (innate abilities) and skills (acquired abilities), and answering questions about the learning process, and which skills you can learn versus which (I suspect none) are strictly hereditary.
Articulating why 'survival skills' are poor substitutes for the instincts that they are designed to replace.
Debunking the myths of, and cult of, leadership in Western society. More about this in a future post.

BUILDING AN ADAPTIVE ENTERPRISE

Sun, 09 Mar 2003 16:50:08 GMT

I subscribe to Cap Gemini's Perspectives on Business Innovation magazine. The theme for the latest edition is The Adaptive Imperative, the need for enterprises to be agile and alert to environmental changes, almost like living creatures. While I think the analogy is a bit forced, the model presented by the magazine's editors is an intriguing one. It prescribes six ways to make your organization more adaptive:

Sense & Respond, Learn & Adapt: Install sensors and feedback capabilities in your business processes and your markets; Use feedback loops in your products; Develop institutional learning mechanisms
Self-Organize: Establish rules for employees that enable flexible processes, and manage the rules, not the employees; Encourage boundary-less communities of interest to form spontaneously and to organize themselves, and use their collective intelligence
Recombine: Improve the cross-connections between ideas, processes and people from across the organization; Increase diversity; Encourage sabbaticals, secondments and exchanges
Seed, Select & Amplify: Use simulations and experiments to try out and test more solutions; Use scenarios
Destabilize: Develop culling processes and exit strategies for everything; Make everything upgradable and customizable by the customer; Reward high-quality failures
Monetize & Liberate Physical Assets: Free your people from fixed offices and your product from fixed plants and production processes; Miniaturize, Mobilize and Transplant; Shrink your inventories to near-zero; Use nano-technologies

The mantra for the adaptive enterprise is Experiment, Don't Plan . I've been reading about, and trying to implement, business strategies and ideas for almost thirty years. I didn't think there was anything new and useful to learn. But thinking about these principles, and how they can apply in good times and bad, perhaps there still is.
A PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION
My comprehensive paper on this topic can be found here.

ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL ECONOMICS: A PRIMER

Thu, 06 Mar 2003 14:55:35 GMT

Getting comfortable with the concepts of environmental and social economics (ESE) requires reading the works of new-generation accountants, economists, tax experts, and policy makers. Not the kind of project that fills most of us with exhilaration. For those not up to that challenge, here's the Cliff's Notes version (Coles Notes if you're a Canadian):

The primary function of ESE is the measurement, regulation and taxation of environmental and social impact, and related policy issues.
The ultimate metric of ESE is the well-being of the planet, communities and their citizens, whereas the ultimate metric of traditional economics is (financial) wealth. Well-being encompasses health, freedom, peace, security , education, a just society, self-sufficiency, biodiversity, renewability and sustainability, not just financial and material comfort.
ESE views people (and sometimes other creatures) as communities of citizens, whereas traditional economics views people as individual consumers.
ESE assesses businesses on the good(s) they create (value of products or services produced, employment created, sustainability and efficiency of production processes, 'clean' capital produced etc.) net of the bad(s) they create (pollution, waste, natural resource use and depletion etc.) This measurement is an extension of what is called full-cost or true-cost accounting.
The principle of ecological taxation is to tax the above goods (things we want more of) less, and tax the above bads (things we want less of) more. It is tax-neutral, shifting the tax burden without increasing it. So a clean business that creates local employment, and an individual that uses only renewable energy would probably pay no tax at all. The result of ecological taxation is that things that are socially and environmentally good will cost less (since they have no tax to pass on to the ultimate user), those that are socially and environmentally bad (e.g. energy created by burning fossil fuels) will cost more, and the overall after-tax cost of living of the citizens will remain unchanged. The tax burden merely shifts from those to those that buy goods to those that buy bads. Several European countries already have some ecological tax laws in place.
At a macro level, ESE looks separately at three fundamental economic problems:

Efficient Resource Allocation - the efficient allocation of scarce resources to producers. Most ESE practitioners acknowledge that the market economy, rather than a planned economy, is the best solution to this problem. However:
Distributive Justice - the equitable distribution of economic products. Traditional economics ignores this ethical disparity issue. ESE practitioners believe governments must intervene through the tax and regulatory system to ensure fairness in distribution (so the current situation where 20% of Earth's people consume 80% of its food, and Africans dying of AIDS cannot afford the treatment, is rectified).
Optimal Scale - the total amount of economic products that are produced. Traditional economics leave this up to the advertiser-influenced 'market'. ESE practitioners believe governments must intervene to set maximum scales of production given the commensurate social and environmental costs of unlimited, extravagant, wasteful manufacturing of products.

The net result of how business and government jointly manage these three problems is reflected in macro measures of well-being. Traditional economics uses Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the overarching measure. GDP measures only financial wealth production, does not factor in social or environmental costs, and does not consider the distributive justice or optimal scale problems described above (i.e. more is always better at any cost, and it doesn't matter who has how much, just the grand total). As ludicrous as it sounds, GDP is the basis on which most fiscal and monetary policy is now based. There are many better measures of well-being, but the best measures are unfortunately the least precise, especially with the lack of data currently available. Some of these better measures, in order of ease of calculation, are:

Green Net National Product (GNNP): GDP less the costs of degradation and depletion of natural resources, i.e. less the cost that would have to be incurred to replace the natural resources used, remediate environmental damage, and restore the assets produced to their undepreciated value. This is already being computed, if somewhat roughly, by many countries.
Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI): GDP plus the value of 'unpaid' work (e.g. volunteerism), less the costs of crime, pollution, disease, family breakdown, and security. This measure is more subjective but brings in social as well as environmental costs and hence is ideally a closer approximation of well-being.
Well-Being Index (WBI): Going beyond the GPI, this index also incorporates measures of civil freedom, security, biodiversity, health, justice and self-sufficiency. It also factors in the disparity of well-being (rich/poor gap).

Generally, ESE also considers the impact of population and over-population. In addition to computing the above measures on a per capita basis, ESE also looks at how limiting population growth and family size can have a multiplier effect on programs that enhance well-being, and conversely how over-population and high population growth rates can stymie ESE initiatives.
ESE practitioners generally oppose untrammeled free trade , pointing out that the alternative to 'free trade' is not 'no trade', but rather regulated trade. Trade regulations that protect local social and environmental programs and standards can contribute to well-being. ESE practitioners tend to promote local self-sufficiency as an inherently efficient means to augment well-being. For example, under traditional economics, importing corn to Mexico from the U.S. makes sense because production efficiencies exceed the cost of transportation. Under ESE, however, after factoring in the dislocation of Mexican labour, loss of local productive capacity, and the additional waste and pollution that are incurred to produce the corn and transport it to Mexico so 'cheaply', this trade becomes patently 'uneconomic'.
So, ESE activism tends to focus on achieving four kinds of change:

Getting governments to stop basing policy decisions, trade treaties and laws on flawed GDP measures, and instead base them on the measures in point 7 above
Getting governments to introduce revenue-neutral ecological taxation to replace some income and consumption taxation, as described in point 5 above
Getting businesses to more fully and accurately disclose their goods and bads as described in point 4 above
Improving the current data, collection, disclosure processes and measurement precision for well-being indicators, both at the national level (point 7 above) and at the business level (point 4 above)

If you want to read more on this, start with this interview with ESE guru Herman Daly. If you want to read a lot more, start with Daly's book Beyond Growth , and then work your way through its bibilography.

BLOGS IN BUSINESS: THE WEBLOG AS FILING CABINET

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 16:37:07 GMT

One of my motivations for starting a Weblog was to explore the potential business applications of 'blogs'. I work as a knowledge officer for a large global organization. I also belong to two consortia of knowledge management (KM) leaders of their respective companies. We have all struggled with ways to capture tacit knowledge (mostly 'know-how') as effectively as we capture explicit knowledge (mostly 'know-what'). This is a challenge for three reasons, best illustrated by using the example of capturing the knowledge of an outstanding sales executive:

Know-how is knowledge in the context of its application , so simply capturing the sales executive's rolodex contents, sales presentations and client visit schedule is not enough. We want to be able to capture what it is (the know-how) that enables him to leverage this 'know-what' so much more powerfully than others with the same 'know-what' at their disposal. Some of this know-how is process, some of it is style, some of it is existing relationships ('know-who') and some of it is interpersonal skills.
Some know-how is not individual at all, but a team dynamic. This sales executive and the industry specialist with whom he normally works are far more effective as a team than they are individually or working as part of other teams. Why? Probably because each has know-how, know-what, and know-who that covers gaps in the other's knowledge set.
Not only do we not know how to capture (or codify to use KM jargon) know-how, we don't know how to motivate or reward the sales executive to get him to codify his knowledge. He's so good at selling, why would he want (or we want him) to take time away from that to codify or blog what he knows?

It's an over-simplification, but it's not unfair to say that this challenge is the #1 reason why KM has made less traction in most companies than many had hoped, despite the enormous promise it holds out.

I recently reviewed a book by a colleague who is the knowledge officer for a large insurance company. The book is about something called Communities of Practice (the networks that form, by both formal and informal means, among business people within and between companies). It was while doing this that I finally realized (I think) what blogs could accomplish in business:

Weblogs could be a mechanism to coherently codify and 'publish' in a completely voluntary and personal manner the individual worker's entire filing cabinet, complete with annotations, marginalia, post-its and personal indexing system.

If that seems like a strained analogy, let me explain. For most of us in business, the filing cabinet is more than just a place to store copies of documents. It is a representation of the way we think and work. It is organized according to our personal mental model of how our job breaks down, so that two people doing the same job will often have completely different-looking filing cabinets. The advent of PCs, especially their database, desktop folder and e-mail archiving functions, has detracted somewhat from the importance of the filing cabinet, but filing cabinets typically have lots of multimedia documents clipped loosely together, often annotated in different readers' handwriting, highlighted, sorted in a mixture of date and subject order etc. PC tools have been developed that mimic these functionalities but they are awkward and unintuitive. But let's look at what a blog has to offer relative to the filing cabinet:

It allows each worker to personally identify who he or she thinks actually belongs to and participates in his or her networks (using the blogroll - the blog equivalent of a rolodex), rather than who their manager thinks should be in those networks
The blogroll consists entirely of active links to the blogs of the other community members, so knowledge is electronically and personally connected
Knowledge can be simply and flexibly indexed (and sorted or filtered) by date and category (using each indiviual's personal taxonomy or 'filing system', not some standard taxonomy system imposed by management)
Instead of containing redundant copies of knowledge from other people like a filing cabinet, the blog simply hotlinks to the 'permalink' (the dynamically-generated URL for a particular piece of knowledge or 'knowledge object') in the other person's blog/filing cabinet
The knowledge is enriched by dynamic links to URLs of relevant news, bibliographies and other external resources used in its compliation, thus greatly increasingly its shelf life by allowing it to be more easily updated
The key external resources (journals, manuals etc.) that the worker uses frequently can be stored in a 'resources roll', consisting of the URLs of these resources; by copying and using an expert's 'resources roll', an apprentice could discover and mimic the 'continuous learning' process of the expert
E-mails are the most valuable untapped codified knowledge resource in most companies, and blogs allow knowledge to be simultaneously posted to one or more e-mail addresses and to the owner's indexed blog/filing cabinet
Workers can easily 'subscribe' to another worker's entire blog (or an individual category/folder subset of it), so they are immediately notified about new knowledge or news that their work teammates or mentors deem valuable
Blogs do not require the learning of HTML or database management, though they perform both functions powerfully
Blogs can easily be designed to either live within a company firewall or to transcend organizational boundaries, and to be accessible in whole or part to some or all other employees, as the trade off between security and value-of-sharing dictates

That's not to say blogs are a panacea. They don't really capture tacit knowledge. They don't solve the 'team knowledge' capture problem. And it would take considerable training to get the average employee to learn to use a blog effectively and comfortably as a complete replacement for the filing cabinet, so that maintaining the blog would take no more time than maintaining the filing cabinet takes now.

But they do represent a potential breakthrough in both personalization and democratization of the process of grass-roots, peer-to-peer knowledge sharing of unfiltered knowledge, the paramount task according to Drucker's Management Challenges for the 21st Century . They represent the best-yet compromise between the anarchy of personal websites on the intranet, and the straight-jacket of most 'corporate-owned' repositories. And I'm old enough to remember managers saying that getting executives to make their own phone calls (instead of using secretaries) was inefficient, that e-mail was a time-waster that executives would never use, and that voice-mail was simply an invitation to endless telephone tag. So although it's not going to be easy, I think blogs might just be ready for business prime time.