A little knowledge is deadly dangerous
By Stefan Stern
Published: January 11 2010 23:23 | Last updated: January 11 2010 23:23
It is the “unknown knowns” that can kill you. But this was the category of information which Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defence secretary, left off his famous list (“known knowns”, “known unknowns”) a few years ago.
A pity. One of the lessons of the September 11 2001 hijackings, as well as the recent attempt to blow up an aircraft on Christmas day, is that organisations may already possess the information they need to avoid disaster. It is just that they do not know that they know.
In criticising his security services last week, Barack Obama summed up this management dilemma well. “This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” he said. “It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.” His colleagues had neglected to “connect the dots”, he observed.
This is a familiar story to business leaders. “If only Unilever knew what Unilever knows,” went the old lament. And you can substitute the name of almost any other company into that last sentence.
It was this lingering sense of unconnectedness, of dots not being joined up, that led to the emergence of “knowledge management” as a business discipline two decades ago. It was based on the idea that all sorts of valuable information – about customers’ preferences or what employees knew – was simply disappearing into the cracks that separated teams and business units. People within their silos could not or would not share knowledge.
Tom Stewart, chief marketing and knowledge officer for consultants Booz, moved the debate on with his 1997 book Intellectual Capital – the New Wealth of Organisations, which described what properly managed knowledge could do for businesses. Surely things were about to change?
Maybe knowledge management was too drab a label to hold people’s attention. Perhaps it all sounded too much like hard work. But “KM” soon fell prey to the curse of the management fad. It was talked about, popularised, then – too often – forgotten. Today too few companies can be confident that their employees share the knowledge and information that they need. Do their people know what they know?
The events over Detroit this Christmas confirmed the danger of ignoring the information that circulates, whether unprocessed or imperfectly understood, within organisations. In a blog post last week, Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter said that dispatching e-mails or entering comments into databases is not enough. Only “relentless follow-up” would hold colleagues accountable for what they were supposed to be doing.
Smart knowledge management involves spotting useful patterns in the data that you have. Leaders should reward “pattern recognisers”, she said. They should also “stress the importance of passing on items of value to others”.
But while Prof Kanter is hopeful that social networking technology will lead to a greater sharing of information, others are not so sure. Morten Hansen, professor at Berkeley and Insead and author of last year’s well-regarded book, Collaboration, sees other factors at play. The failure of colleagues to communicate effectively “requires a change in culture and incentive systems, not an IT fix”, he says.
Obama’s first year
Obama Barack
In depth: news and analysis of Barack Obama’s first year in office as US president
It is not always easy to recognise the value of the information you have. The father of the alleged Detroit bomber, a former banker from Nigeria, warned US officials about his concerns over his son. For whatever reason – fatigue, overwork – the crucial tip-off was ignored. Too casual by half. The son’s name was even mis-spelled by one official, confusing his identity.
But information must be taken seriously. Managers need more than gut instinct and past experience to help them make good decisions. This means that knowledge has to be seen as an asset, something to be both respected and exploited.
This is why the collective corporate memory is so important. People forget – or just never get to learn – crucial details about the markets they are operating in. Veteran CIA officers understand this. As one former field operative, Bob Baer, told the BBC last week, it is no wonder his former colleagues seem “clueless” about where the next threat is coming from. “You’re seeing the price the CIA is paying for getting rid of so many people in the 1990s,” he said. “We fired people or let them retire.”
If we didn’t know then how unwise that approach was, we know now.
For more on management, visit www.ft.com/managementblog
stefan.stern@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Showing posts with label Knowledge Management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Knowledge Management. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Creative thinkers: innovative lawyers on the shortlist
Creative thinkers: innovative lawyers on the shortlist
Published: October 19 2010 13:10 | Last updated: October 19 2010 13:10
What defines the innovative lawyer? Three qualities: deep attention to client needs, respect for the way things have been done in the past, and an imaginative adaption of traditions to novel circumstances.
Last year’s Legal Innovator of the Year was Benedikt Wolfers of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, who provided a dramatic example of this. Mr Wolfers designed the legislation that enabled the German government to repair the banking system – no easy task in a country deeply sensitive, for historical reasons, to anything smacking of bank expropriation.
In 2010, we are dealing with the aftermath of the banking crisis rather than the crisis itself. Businesses are looking for ways to cut costs and protect their activities, while rethinking the ways they carry them out. The 10 shortlisted candidates reflected these priorities. All provided strong evidence of innovation, but four in particular attracted the judges’ attention.
Neville Eisenberg is managing partner at Berwin Leighton Paisner, which has taken over all the legal services of Thames Water. The firm intends this arrangement – familiar from the world of information technology – to be the template for further deals.
David Lowe, a partner at Wragge & Co, won plaudits for the range of his activities, including advising the Greater London Authority in its bid for the 2012 Olympics, and helping Birds Eye Iglo with the arrangements for its frozen-food warehousing.
Judging panel
Leah Cooper
Director of legal services outsourcing, CPA Global
Peter Cornell
Managing director of stakeholder relations, Terra Firma, and former managing partner, Clifford Chance
Michael Peel
FT legal correspondent
Michael Skapinker
FT special reports editor and chairman of the panel
Paul Solman
Lead editor, FT Innovative Lawyers
Geoffrey Timms
General counsel, Legal & General
The runner-up for our award was Sandra Esquiva-Hesse, a partner in the Paris office of US firm Paul Hastings. Ms Esquiva-Hesse has been involved in a number of restructuring operations, the most eye-catching of which was the reorganisation and sale of Acument Global Technologies’ French automotive fastener business to Lisi Automotive and Agrati France. She made use of the conciliation process normally employed to ratify agreements between debtors and creditors. For the first time, a French commercial court used this process to ratify a restructuring and sale.
But our winner was Kevin Jaquiss, a partner at Cobbetts, who has helped fashion a new form of ownership for mutual organisations, allowing them to be funded through shares rather than, as has traditionally been the case, through debt. Innovative aspects include shareholders not being able to buy control and being locked in for a set period of time. There is potential for investors to earn a return, but only after the community has benefited.
The model has been applied to FC United, an organisation formed by disgruntled Manchester United fans who want to take over a disused stadium and run it for the benefit of a deprived part of the city.
Mr Jaquiss has also helped establish a co-operative trust model that is being used for more than 100 schools, and developed a model for football supporters’ trusts. During a period of austerity that demands fresh thinking, Mr Jaquiss’s innovations captured the mood of the times. – Michael Skapinker
Kevin Jaquiss
WINNER: KEVIN JAQUISS
Partner, Cobbetts, Manchester
Kevin Jaquiss is an expert in community benefit societies. Described by a client as pioneering a form of “punk finance”, which enables people and community organisations to “do it themselves”, his work is creating new legal structures for community enterprises in sport, housing, care, utilities and leisure.
Community benefit societies are incorporated industrial and provident groups that conduct business for the benefit of their community. Traditionally, profits are not distributed among members or external shareholders, and the basic model has existed for more than a century. The law in this area has remained dormant since the 1960s.
Crucial to making the societies a viable future mode of social organisation was to transform the conditions under which they are financed. Historically, mutual organisations have not been able to issue shares and have been funded largely from debt. The recession has made affordable credit hard to find.
Faced with these issues, Mr Jaquiss worked to develop a form of share ownership for mutual organisations. This entailed heavy involvement in a Treasury working group, with Cobbetts the only law firm at the table helping to shape new legislation in this area.
Mr Jaquiss’s solution modifies the usual idea of share ownership in two ways. First, shareholders cannot buy more control with more shares, and the societies remain one-member-one-vote organisations. Second, shares cannot be easily traded, and shareholders are effectively locked in for a set time after their purchase. There is also a potential return on any investment, but only after the intended benefit has been accrued.
This has been applied notably in the case of FC United, a community benefit society formed by Manchester United supporters in the wake of continuing disputes with the Glazer family, owners of the football club. The new club aims to take over a disused stadium, refurbish it and run services for the benefit of the deprived local community.
These principles can be applied to energy, water and housing companies, schools and even foundation trusts.
Dimitry Afanasiev
DIMITRY AFANASIEV
Chairman, Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners, Moscow
Dimitry Afanasiev co-founded Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners in 1993, and has chaired the 180-lawyer partnership for more than a decade, overseeing offices in St Petersburg, Moscow and London.
He attributes his success to his western training, his connections and his creativity as a lawyer – a claim that could just as easily have come from the mouth of any successful international lawyer. But with Mr Afanasiev, this troika of legal attributes must be put in the context of a jurisdiction where he cites corruption as his biggest competitor.
After studying at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, Mr Afanasiev had his start in law when Jerry Shestack, a former president of the American Bar Association, hired him to join his Philadelphia law firm. Mr Afanasiev later followed his mentor to Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen. These formative experiences encouraged him to transplant the western-style law firm model to Russia.
Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners’ “east meets west” approach has helped the firm win instructions to act both for and against the Russian government.
But its success also stems from its ties to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and Dmitry Medvedev, president, that stretch back to the firm’s roots at the St Petersburg Institute of Law. The firm’s clients also include the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, chief executive of Rusal, the world’s largest aluminium group.
Stephen Cirell
STEPHEN CIRELL
Partner, Eversheds, on secondment to Cornwall Council
Stephen Cirell is responsible for putting in place measures that will see the English county of Cornwall become energy self-sufficient by 2025.
In his non-legal role as director of Green Cornwall at Cornwall Council, this Eversheds partner has spent the past year designing and implementing a £150m ($240m) environmental programme for the newly created “super” local authority.
Mr Cirell’s initiatives relating to climate change, sustainable energy, low carbon and behaviour have ambitious designs on harnessing Cornwall’s abundance of wind, wave and solar energy (see page 16).
A new fleet of electric cars for council workers is one of the most highly visible aspects of his carbon-reducing proposals. The next challenge for the Green Cornwall programme is to obtain a grant from the Department for Transport to install recharging plug-in points across the county.
Mr Cirell spent 12 years working in the legal departments of local government before he joined Eversheds in 1993. He built up a leading local government practice at the firm, and has since managed to combine that with a personal interest in green issues.
What began as advice to local authorities on setting up renewable energy companies soon evolved into an approach to Cornwall Council about a partner secondment, and the Green Cornwall programme represents the pinnacle of his 30-year career in local government. As his secondment at Cornwall Council draws to a close, Mr Cirell is turning his attention to writing a book on climate change for local government. This cross-fertilisation of theory and practice is consistent with his approach to the law.
Neville Eisenberg
NEVILLE EISENBERG
Managing partner, Berwin Leighton Paisner, London
Berwin Leighton Paisner consistently scores highly in the FT Law 50, and much of this achievement stems from the leadership of Neville Eisenberg. As managing partner of BLP, he has sought to maintain the momentum of the firm’s 2003 merger through an ambitious emerging markets strategy and a pioneering approach to efficiency.
In 2009, Mr Eisenberg identified the need for BLP to develop a presence in emerging markets. The resulting merger between BLP and the Goltsblat half of Moscow’s largest law firm, Pepelyaev, Goltsblat & Partners, created the first Russian international law firm, Goltsblat BLP.
Mr Eisenberg has since led the firm to develop a radical resourcing product, which is on the leading edge of an “arms race” towards more efficient ways of providing legal services to clients.
BLP’s Managed Legal Service, shortlisted in the client service section of this year’s FT Innovative Lawyers, involves the firm taking on and managing most of a client’s in-house legal team.
Mr Eisenberg believes the best way to engender an innovative environment within a law firm is to work on establishing a culture where lawyers feel comfortable experimenting, and are able to shift between the often risk-adverse mind-set of the traditional lawyer towards a more entrepreneurial one.
Sandra Esquiva-Hesse
SANDRA ESQUIVA-HESSE
Partner, Paul Hastings, Paris
The career of Sandra Esquiva-Hesse has been fuelled by the global cycle of refinancing and corporate restructurings. The current wave, as she puts it, began for her two years ago when she represented Marvel and Spider-Man Merchandising in relation to the insolvency of Smoby, the French toy manufacturer.
As the partner in charge of developing Paul Hastings’ finance and restructuring practice in Paris, her transactional work in the intervening period has culminated in one of her deals – the reorganisation and sale of Acument Global Technologies’ faltering French businesses – being shortlisted in the corporate section of this year’s FT Innovative Lawyers.
Ms Esquiva-Hesse has worked and studied in both the US and France, and she attributes much of her success to her training at Shearman & Sterling in New York. The early incentives and encouragement she received to be creative, and the knowledge she acquired of the more prescriptive US Chapter 11 bankruptcy procedure, moulded the legal approach she took back across the Atlantic.
This mixture of systems and jurisdictions is in keeping with her partnership role at a US firm in Paris, and her “yes you can” approach is pushing forward the nebulous insolvency law in her native France.
Mike Francies
MIKE FRANCIES
Managing partner, London office, Weil, Gotshal & Manges
Membership of Weil, Gotshal & Manges’ management committee has not damped Mike Francies’ appetite for doing deals.
His extensive career in corporate, private equity and restructuring has seen a number of achievements, including the first private equity bid in Europe and the first European private equity initial public offering. In 1998, he was one of the first “magic circle” partners to be poached by a US firm in London, when he left Clifford Chance for Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
But it is the restructuring arm of Mr Francies’ CV that he has been flexing of late. The management buy-out of Neuberger Berman, the former asset management arm of Lehman Brothers, was one of the bankruptcy sales that was highly commended in the FT Innovative Lawyers research last year. At the same time as Mr Francies was wading through the remnants of the US bank’s collapse, he played a critical role in the sale of a majority stake in Cobra Beer, the UK lager brand, to Molson Coors, the North American brewer.
The latter deal hints at the food and beverages flavour to his recent deal activity. He advised Patak’s on the sale of the Patak family’s Indian food brand to Associated British Foods; he has worked on various acquisitions, a placing and the initial public offering of Premier Foods, food manufacturer of Hovis bread and Mr Kipling cakes; and he acted for the Seafood Company on its acquisition of Pinneys of Scotland.
Much of Mr Francies’ work in this sector comes through his relationship with Lion Capital, the consumer-focused investment firm.
High-profile deals in other sectors include the $3.2bn IPO of Yell, producer of the Yellow Pages, which he says might not have happened without the lawyers’ contributions.
Alex Hamilton
ALEX HAMILTON
Partner, Latham & Watkins, London
Alex Hamilton has been a consistent presence in FT Innovative Lawyers, having led three of Latham & Watkins’ previous entries in the report.
Law firms traditionally lag behind other industries when it comes to embracing new technology, but Mr Hamilton, who co-chairs Latham & Watkins’ global technology transactions group, has pushed forward both his firm and the legal sector as a whole.
In 2006, he was behind the implementation of the Diamond Methodology, which enables clients to do better, quicker and cheaper deals, and redesigned the way the firm approaches contracts. In 2008, he led the development of a wiki-based knowledge management system that promotes better practice through increased sharing of data.
The following year, Mr Hamilton continued to push technological solutions within the firm with Capture, a set of dynamic documents to record client requirements in outsourcing deals where speed and cost are critical. The technology has boosted client instructions of the firm, including a recent $500m transaction.
His most recent initiative, an application to manage complex contracts, allows lawyers and clients to search contracts hosted on the firm’s private network, define terms and link any term to comment wikis.
The emphasis is on helping clients understand their obligations following the signing of multiple transaction documents, and users have described it as the “kind of tool that you get from consultancies such as Deloitte and Accenture”.
Known as Context, the application is the latest example of Mr Hamilton using technology as a catalyst for collaboration.
David Lowe
DAVID LOWE
Partner, Wragge & Co, London
David Lowe is a relative rarity in the highly specialised world of corporate law, because as a commercial contracts lawyer he operates in a swathe of sectors, ranging from food and drinks to real estate, outsourcing, the motoring industry, procurement, supply-chain management, manufacturing, logistics and international trade.
This breadth of experience is the spur to many of Mr Lowe’s best ideas, which can often be of critical importance to his clients.
His knowledge of supply-chain management has proven especially useful. When engaged by Birds Eye Iglo in 2008 to work on relatively routine logistical documentation, Mr Lowe spotted a risk that the company had yet to consider: the potential insolvency of its sole UK frozen-food warehouse provider.
Seeing law as more of a means to an end than an end in itself, Mr Lowe’s work frequently edges into operational and commercial advice. He is active in various international trade projects, including the development of Incoterms 2010, the terms of international freight delivery.
This gives him a big-picture viewpoint from which to advise his clients and help them devise the best possible supply chains, which he has done for Birds Eye in Turkey, and on a $30m export deal involving moving an automotive plant to China.
He has also been involved in two high-profile contract procurement agreements: advising Transport for London on its cycle-hire scheme, and reviewing the contracts for the Greater London Authority in its bid for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Volker Potthoff
VOLKER POTTHOFF
Of counsel, CMS Hasche Sigle, Frankfurt
Volker Potthoff uses his experience as both a lawyer and a company director to push for closer business relationships between Germany and China. At CMS Hasche Sigle, he co-ordinates the German firm’s expansion into Asia, and he was involved in the first German initial public offering by a Chinese company.
Mr Potthoff believes lawyers should see the profession as a support for business, and he has assembled a multidisciplinary group of investment bankers, auditors, former colleagues at Deutsche Börse, the German exchange where he was general counsel, and partners from the capital markets team of CMS Hasche Sigle to encourage the flow of capital from Europe to China.
His hybrid legal and business role at CMS Hasche Sigle follows an unusual legal career, going from private practice to in-house and back again.
He began at White & Case in New York and Leinen & Derichs in Cologne, before moving to a client-side legal position at BHF-Bank in Frankfurt, and taking up the role of chief legal counsel at Deutsche Börse.
But it is the management positions and directorships that Mr Potthoff has occupied – including a seat on the Deutsche Börse executive board – that sets him apart from other lawyers and goes some way to explaining his business-minded approach to the law. It was while at Deutsche Börse that Mr Potthoff kicked off his network of Chinese businesses with the People’s Bank of China.
With one foot in law and the other in business, it is not surprising that Mr Potthoff takes an interest in corporate governance, and he sees board advisory roles as falling within the remit of the modern lawyer.
Andrew Vellani
ANDREW VELLANI
Chief legal officer, director and management board member, Cofra Holding, Zurich
Andrew Vellani is included in the Legal Innovator of the Year shortlist for his dynamic approach to managing the global in-house legal function for Cofra Holding, a large conglomerate based in Switzerland.
Arriving at the company in 2002, Mr Vellani was immediately involved in transforming the shape of the business before he turned his attention to the in-house legal department.
As a member of the three-person management team, which operates directly below the supervisory board of the private company, he was involved in bringing together diverse multinational businesses under the auspices of a new holding company. He then created a dedicated group legal team by separating the legal affairs of the private company from that of its controlling shareholders, the Brenninkmeijer family.
Mr Vellani’s vision for his newly created group legal function was a seamless global team that united 13 previously semi-autonomous offices around the world. In doing this, his greatest achievement has been to take a new cross-border approach to managing his diverse team.
He led the introduction of intranet systems to help manage legal matters, and established a litigation reporting system to monitor progress of cases and to facilitate a more systematic assessment of risk. Mr Vellani has also put in place a training system that gives young lawyers experience of the conglomerate’s businesses.
Mr Vellani has been involved in a series of important transactions, including selling the London Mortgage Company, American Retail Group and a big Brazilian consumer bank.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Published: October 19 2010 13:10 | Last updated: October 19 2010 13:10
What defines the innovative lawyer? Three qualities: deep attention to client needs, respect for the way things have been done in the past, and an imaginative adaption of traditions to novel circumstances.
Last year’s Legal Innovator of the Year was Benedikt Wolfers of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, who provided a dramatic example of this. Mr Wolfers designed the legislation that enabled the German government to repair the banking system – no easy task in a country deeply sensitive, for historical reasons, to anything smacking of bank expropriation.
In 2010, we are dealing with the aftermath of the banking crisis rather than the crisis itself. Businesses are looking for ways to cut costs and protect their activities, while rethinking the ways they carry them out. The 10 shortlisted candidates reflected these priorities. All provided strong evidence of innovation, but four in particular attracted the judges’ attention.
Neville Eisenberg is managing partner at Berwin Leighton Paisner, which has taken over all the legal services of Thames Water. The firm intends this arrangement – familiar from the world of information technology – to be the template for further deals.
David Lowe, a partner at Wragge & Co, won plaudits for the range of his activities, including advising the Greater London Authority in its bid for the 2012 Olympics, and helping Birds Eye Iglo with the arrangements for its frozen-food warehousing.
Judging panel
Leah Cooper
Director of legal services outsourcing, CPA Global
Peter Cornell
Managing director of stakeholder relations, Terra Firma, and former managing partner, Clifford Chance
Michael Peel
FT legal correspondent
Michael Skapinker
FT special reports editor and chairman of the panel
Paul Solman
Lead editor, FT Innovative Lawyers
Geoffrey Timms
General counsel, Legal & General
The runner-up for our award was Sandra Esquiva-Hesse, a partner in the Paris office of US firm Paul Hastings. Ms Esquiva-Hesse has been involved in a number of restructuring operations, the most eye-catching of which was the reorganisation and sale of Acument Global Technologies’ French automotive fastener business to Lisi Automotive and Agrati France. She made use of the conciliation process normally employed to ratify agreements between debtors and creditors. For the first time, a French commercial court used this process to ratify a restructuring and sale.
But our winner was Kevin Jaquiss, a partner at Cobbetts, who has helped fashion a new form of ownership for mutual organisations, allowing them to be funded through shares rather than, as has traditionally been the case, through debt. Innovative aspects include shareholders not being able to buy control and being locked in for a set period of time. There is potential for investors to earn a return, but only after the community has benefited.
The model has been applied to FC United, an organisation formed by disgruntled Manchester United fans who want to take over a disused stadium and run it for the benefit of a deprived part of the city.
Mr Jaquiss has also helped establish a co-operative trust model that is being used for more than 100 schools, and developed a model for football supporters’ trusts. During a period of austerity that demands fresh thinking, Mr Jaquiss’s innovations captured the mood of the times. – Michael Skapinker
Kevin Jaquiss
WINNER: KEVIN JAQUISS
Partner, Cobbetts, Manchester
Kevin Jaquiss is an expert in community benefit societies. Described by a client as pioneering a form of “punk finance”, which enables people and community organisations to “do it themselves”, his work is creating new legal structures for community enterprises in sport, housing, care, utilities and leisure.
Community benefit societies are incorporated industrial and provident groups that conduct business for the benefit of their community. Traditionally, profits are not distributed among members or external shareholders, and the basic model has existed for more than a century. The law in this area has remained dormant since the 1960s.
Crucial to making the societies a viable future mode of social organisation was to transform the conditions under which they are financed. Historically, mutual organisations have not been able to issue shares and have been funded largely from debt. The recession has made affordable credit hard to find.
Faced with these issues, Mr Jaquiss worked to develop a form of share ownership for mutual organisations. This entailed heavy involvement in a Treasury working group, with Cobbetts the only law firm at the table helping to shape new legislation in this area.
Mr Jaquiss’s solution modifies the usual idea of share ownership in two ways. First, shareholders cannot buy more control with more shares, and the societies remain one-member-one-vote organisations. Second, shares cannot be easily traded, and shareholders are effectively locked in for a set time after their purchase. There is also a potential return on any investment, but only after the intended benefit has been accrued.
This has been applied notably in the case of FC United, a community benefit society formed by Manchester United supporters in the wake of continuing disputes with the Glazer family, owners of the football club. The new club aims to take over a disused stadium, refurbish it and run services for the benefit of the deprived local community.
These principles can be applied to energy, water and housing companies, schools and even foundation trusts.
Dimitry Afanasiev
DIMITRY AFANASIEV
Chairman, Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners, Moscow
Dimitry Afanasiev co-founded Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners in 1993, and has chaired the 180-lawyer partnership for more than a decade, overseeing offices in St Petersburg, Moscow and London.
He attributes his success to his western training, his connections and his creativity as a lawyer – a claim that could just as easily have come from the mouth of any successful international lawyer. But with Mr Afanasiev, this troika of legal attributes must be put in the context of a jurisdiction where he cites corruption as his biggest competitor.
After studying at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, Mr Afanasiev had his start in law when Jerry Shestack, a former president of the American Bar Association, hired him to join his Philadelphia law firm. Mr Afanasiev later followed his mentor to Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen. These formative experiences encouraged him to transplant the western-style law firm model to Russia.
Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners’ “east meets west” approach has helped the firm win instructions to act both for and against the Russian government.
But its success also stems from its ties to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and Dmitry Medvedev, president, that stretch back to the firm’s roots at the St Petersburg Institute of Law. The firm’s clients also include the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, chief executive of Rusal, the world’s largest aluminium group.
Stephen Cirell
STEPHEN CIRELL
Partner, Eversheds, on secondment to Cornwall Council
Stephen Cirell is responsible for putting in place measures that will see the English county of Cornwall become energy self-sufficient by 2025.
In his non-legal role as director of Green Cornwall at Cornwall Council, this Eversheds partner has spent the past year designing and implementing a £150m ($240m) environmental programme for the newly created “super” local authority.
Mr Cirell’s initiatives relating to climate change, sustainable energy, low carbon and behaviour have ambitious designs on harnessing Cornwall’s abundance of wind, wave and solar energy (see page 16).
A new fleet of electric cars for council workers is one of the most highly visible aspects of his carbon-reducing proposals. The next challenge for the Green Cornwall programme is to obtain a grant from the Department for Transport to install recharging plug-in points across the county.
Mr Cirell spent 12 years working in the legal departments of local government before he joined Eversheds in 1993. He built up a leading local government practice at the firm, and has since managed to combine that with a personal interest in green issues.
What began as advice to local authorities on setting up renewable energy companies soon evolved into an approach to Cornwall Council about a partner secondment, and the Green Cornwall programme represents the pinnacle of his 30-year career in local government. As his secondment at Cornwall Council draws to a close, Mr Cirell is turning his attention to writing a book on climate change for local government. This cross-fertilisation of theory and practice is consistent with his approach to the law.
Neville Eisenberg
NEVILLE EISENBERG
Managing partner, Berwin Leighton Paisner, London
Berwin Leighton Paisner consistently scores highly in the FT Law 50, and much of this achievement stems from the leadership of Neville Eisenberg. As managing partner of BLP, he has sought to maintain the momentum of the firm’s 2003 merger through an ambitious emerging markets strategy and a pioneering approach to efficiency.
In 2009, Mr Eisenberg identified the need for BLP to develop a presence in emerging markets. The resulting merger between BLP and the Goltsblat half of Moscow’s largest law firm, Pepelyaev, Goltsblat & Partners, created the first Russian international law firm, Goltsblat BLP.
Mr Eisenberg has since led the firm to develop a radical resourcing product, which is on the leading edge of an “arms race” towards more efficient ways of providing legal services to clients.
BLP’s Managed Legal Service, shortlisted in the client service section of this year’s FT Innovative Lawyers, involves the firm taking on and managing most of a client’s in-house legal team.
Mr Eisenberg believes the best way to engender an innovative environment within a law firm is to work on establishing a culture where lawyers feel comfortable experimenting, and are able to shift between the often risk-adverse mind-set of the traditional lawyer towards a more entrepreneurial one.
Sandra Esquiva-Hesse
SANDRA ESQUIVA-HESSE
Partner, Paul Hastings, Paris
The career of Sandra Esquiva-Hesse has been fuelled by the global cycle of refinancing and corporate restructurings. The current wave, as she puts it, began for her two years ago when she represented Marvel and Spider-Man Merchandising in relation to the insolvency of Smoby, the French toy manufacturer.
As the partner in charge of developing Paul Hastings’ finance and restructuring practice in Paris, her transactional work in the intervening period has culminated in one of her deals – the reorganisation and sale of Acument Global Technologies’ faltering French businesses – being shortlisted in the corporate section of this year’s FT Innovative Lawyers.
Ms Esquiva-Hesse has worked and studied in both the US and France, and she attributes much of her success to her training at Shearman & Sterling in New York. The early incentives and encouragement she received to be creative, and the knowledge she acquired of the more prescriptive US Chapter 11 bankruptcy procedure, moulded the legal approach she took back across the Atlantic.
This mixture of systems and jurisdictions is in keeping with her partnership role at a US firm in Paris, and her “yes you can” approach is pushing forward the nebulous insolvency law in her native France.
Mike Francies
MIKE FRANCIES
Managing partner, London office, Weil, Gotshal & Manges
Membership of Weil, Gotshal & Manges’ management committee has not damped Mike Francies’ appetite for doing deals.
His extensive career in corporate, private equity and restructuring has seen a number of achievements, including the first private equity bid in Europe and the first European private equity initial public offering. In 1998, he was one of the first “magic circle” partners to be poached by a US firm in London, when he left Clifford Chance for Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
But it is the restructuring arm of Mr Francies’ CV that he has been flexing of late. The management buy-out of Neuberger Berman, the former asset management arm of Lehman Brothers, was one of the bankruptcy sales that was highly commended in the FT Innovative Lawyers research last year. At the same time as Mr Francies was wading through the remnants of the US bank’s collapse, he played a critical role in the sale of a majority stake in Cobra Beer, the UK lager brand, to Molson Coors, the North American brewer.
The latter deal hints at the food and beverages flavour to his recent deal activity. He advised Patak’s on the sale of the Patak family’s Indian food brand to Associated British Foods; he has worked on various acquisitions, a placing and the initial public offering of Premier Foods, food manufacturer of Hovis bread and Mr Kipling cakes; and he acted for the Seafood Company on its acquisition of Pinneys of Scotland.
Much of Mr Francies’ work in this sector comes through his relationship with Lion Capital, the consumer-focused investment firm.
High-profile deals in other sectors include the $3.2bn IPO of Yell, producer of the Yellow Pages, which he says might not have happened without the lawyers’ contributions.
Alex Hamilton
ALEX HAMILTON
Partner, Latham & Watkins, London
Alex Hamilton has been a consistent presence in FT Innovative Lawyers, having led three of Latham & Watkins’ previous entries in the report.
Law firms traditionally lag behind other industries when it comes to embracing new technology, but Mr Hamilton, who co-chairs Latham & Watkins’ global technology transactions group, has pushed forward both his firm and the legal sector as a whole.
In 2006, he was behind the implementation of the Diamond Methodology, which enables clients to do better, quicker and cheaper deals, and redesigned the way the firm approaches contracts. In 2008, he led the development of a wiki-based knowledge management system that promotes better practice through increased sharing of data.
The following year, Mr Hamilton continued to push technological solutions within the firm with Capture, a set of dynamic documents to record client requirements in outsourcing deals where speed and cost are critical. The technology has boosted client instructions of the firm, including a recent $500m transaction.
His most recent initiative, an application to manage complex contracts, allows lawyers and clients to search contracts hosted on the firm’s private network, define terms and link any term to comment wikis.
The emphasis is on helping clients understand their obligations following the signing of multiple transaction documents, and users have described it as the “kind of tool that you get from consultancies such as Deloitte and Accenture”.
Known as Context, the application is the latest example of Mr Hamilton using technology as a catalyst for collaboration.
David Lowe
DAVID LOWE
Partner, Wragge & Co, London
David Lowe is a relative rarity in the highly specialised world of corporate law, because as a commercial contracts lawyer he operates in a swathe of sectors, ranging from food and drinks to real estate, outsourcing, the motoring industry, procurement, supply-chain management, manufacturing, logistics and international trade.
This breadth of experience is the spur to many of Mr Lowe’s best ideas, which can often be of critical importance to his clients.
His knowledge of supply-chain management has proven especially useful. When engaged by Birds Eye Iglo in 2008 to work on relatively routine logistical documentation, Mr Lowe spotted a risk that the company had yet to consider: the potential insolvency of its sole UK frozen-food warehouse provider.
Seeing law as more of a means to an end than an end in itself, Mr Lowe’s work frequently edges into operational and commercial advice. He is active in various international trade projects, including the development of Incoterms 2010, the terms of international freight delivery.
This gives him a big-picture viewpoint from which to advise his clients and help them devise the best possible supply chains, which he has done for Birds Eye in Turkey, and on a $30m export deal involving moving an automotive plant to China.
He has also been involved in two high-profile contract procurement agreements: advising Transport for London on its cycle-hire scheme, and reviewing the contracts for the Greater London Authority in its bid for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Volker Potthoff
VOLKER POTTHOFF
Of counsel, CMS Hasche Sigle, Frankfurt
Volker Potthoff uses his experience as both a lawyer and a company director to push for closer business relationships between Germany and China. At CMS Hasche Sigle, he co-ordinates the German firm’s expansion into Asia, and he was involved in the first German initial public offering by a Chinese company.
Mr Potthoff believes lawyers should see the profession as a support for business, and he has assembled a multidisciplinary group of investment bankers, auditors, former colleagues at Deutsche Börse, the German exchange where he was general counsel, and partners from the capital markets team of CMS Hasche Sigle to encourage the flow of capital from Europe to China.
His hybrid legal and business role at CMS Hasche Sigle follows an unusual legal career, going from private practice to in-house and back again.
He began at White & Case in New York and Leinen & Derichs in Cologne, before moving to a client-side legal position at BHF-Bank in Frankfurt, and taking up the role of chief legal counsel at Deutsche Börse.
But it is the management positions and directorships that Mr Potthoff has occupied – including a seat on the Deutsche Börse executive board – that sets him apart from other lawyers and goes some way to explaining his business-minded approach to the law. It was while at Deutsche Börse that Mr Potthoff kicked off his network of Chinese businesses with the People’s Bank of China.
With one foot in law and the other in business, it is not surprising that Mr Potthoff takes an interest in corporate governance, and he sees board advisory roles as falling within the remit of the modern lawyer.
Andrew Vellani
ANDREW VELLANI
Chief legal officer, director and management board member, Cofra Holding, Zurich
Andrew Vellani is included in the Legal Innovator of the Year shortlist for his dynamic approach to managing the global in-house legal function for Cofra Holding, a large conglomerate based in Switzerland.
Arriving at the company in 2002, Mr Vellani was immediately involved in transforming the shape of the business before he turned his attention to the in-house legal department.
As a member of the three-person management team, which operates directly below the supervisory board of the private company, he was involved in bringing together diverse multinational businesses under the auspices of a new holding company. He then created a dedicated group legal team by separating the legal affairs of the private company from that of its controlling shareholders, the Brenninkmeijer family.
Mr Vellani’s vision for his newly created group legal function was a seamless global team that united 13 previously semi-autonomous offices around the world. In doing this, his greatest achievement has been to take a new cross-border approach to managing his diverse team.
He led the introduction of intranet systems to help manage legal matters, and established a litigation reporting system to monitor progress of cases and to facilitate a more systematic assessment of risk. Mr Vellani has also put in place a training system that gives young lawyers experience of the conglomerate’s businesses.
Mr Vellani has been involved in a series of important transactions, including selling the London Mortgage Company, American Retail Group and a big Brazilian consumer bank.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review
The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review: "The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy"
9:00 AM Tuesday February 2, 2010
by David Weinberger | Comments (19)
The data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy seemed like a really great idea when it was first proposed. But its rapid acceptance was in fact a sign of how worried we were about the real value of the information systems we had built at such great expense. What looks like a logical progression is actually a desperate cry for help.
The DIKW hierarchy (as it came to be known) was brought to prominence by Russell Ackoff in his address accepting the presidency of the International Society for General Systems Research in 1989. But the actual first recorded instance of it was in 1934:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in the information?
Those lines come from the poem "The Rock" by T.S. Eliot. (And for now we can skip over the 1979 reference in the song "Packard Goose" by Frank Zappa.) The sequence seems to have been reinvented in the late 1980s, independent of these poetic invocations.
The DIKW sequence made immediate sense because it extends what every Computer Science 101 class learns: information is a refinement of mere data. Information thus is the value we extract from data. But once the idea of information overload started taking root (popularized in Alvin Toffler's 1970 Future Shock), we needed a way to characterize the value we extract from information. So we looked for something that would do to information what information did to data. Ackoff suggested knowledge as the value of information, and we collectively nodded our heads.
But, the info-to-knowledge move is far more problematic than the data-to-info one. Ask someone outside of the circle of information scientists what "information" means and you'll find that it's a hollow term. It thus was available for redefinition. But "knowledge" is one of the most important words in our culture, with a long and profound history. In the DIKW hierarchy "knowledge" slips its mooring, and that matters.
So, what is "knowledge" in the DIKW pyramid? For Ackoff, knowledge transforms "information into instructions." Milan Zeleny, who came up with the hierarchy a couple of years before Ackoff, says that knowledge is like the recipe that lets you make bread out of the information-ingredients of flour and yeast (with data as the atoms of the ingredients). The European Committee for Standardization's official "Guide to Good Practice in Knowledge Management" says: "Knowledge is the combination of data and information, to which is added expert opinion, skills and experience, to result in a valuable asset which can be used to aid decision making."
The emphasis in all these cases is on knowledge being "actionable" because of the business context, and on knowledge being a refinement of information because that's how we extracted value from data. That may be a useful way of thinking about the value of information, but it's pretty far from what knowledge has been during its 2,500 year history. Throughout that period, Plato's definition has basically held: Knowledge has been something like the set of beliefs that are true and that we are justified in believing. Indeed, we've thought that knowledge is not a mere agglomeration of true beliefs but that it reflects the systematic and even organic nature of the universe. The pieces go together and make something true and beautiful. More, knowledge has been the distinctly human project, the exercise of the highest and defining capabilities of humans, a fulfillment of our nature, a transgenerational treasure that it is each person's duty and honor to enhance.
But, nah, we needed a word to explain what good comes from our massive investment in computers, so we grabbed ahold of "knowledge" and redefined it as we had to. Then we threw "wisdom" into the mix. Bah.
And humbug. The real problem isn't the DIKW's hijacking of the word "knowledge" but its implication that knowledge derives from filtering information. It doesn't. We can learn some facts by combing through databases. We can see some true correlations by running sophisticated algorithms over massive amounts of information. All that's good.
But knowledge is not a result merely of filtering or algorithms. It results from a far more complex process that is social, goal-driven, contextual, and culturally-bound. We get to knowledge — especially "actionable" knowledge — by having desires and curiosity, through plotting and play, by being wrong more often than right, by talking with others and forming social bonds, by applying methods and then backing away from them, by calculation and serendipity, by rationality and intuition, by institutional processes and social roles. Most important in this regard, where the decisions are tough and knowledge is hard to come by, knowledge is not determined by information, for it is the knowing process that first decides which information is relevant, and how it is to be used.
The real problem with the DIKW pyramid is that it's a pyramid. The image that knowledge (much less wisdom) results from applying finer-grained filters at each level, paints the wrong picture. That view is natural to the Information Age which has been all about filtering noise, reducing the flow to what is clean, clear and manageable. Knowledge is more creative, messier, harder won, and far more discontinuous.
9:00 AM Tuesday February 2, 2010
by David Weinberger | Comments (19)
The data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy seemed like a really great idea when it was first proposed. But its rapid acceptance was in fact a sign of how worried we were about the real value of the information systems we had built at such great expense. What looks like a logical progression is actually a desperate cry for help.
The DIKW hierarchy (as it came to be known) was brought to prominence by Russell Ackoff in his address accepting the presidency of the International Society for General Systems Research in 1989. But the actual first recorded instance of it was in 1934:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in the information?
Those lines come from the poem "The Rock" by T.S. Eliot. (And for now we can skip over the 1979 reference in the song "Packard Goose" by Frank Zappa.) The sequence seems to have been reinvented in the late 1980s, independent of these poetic invocations.
The DIKW sequence made immediate sense because it extends what every Computer Science 101 class learns: information is a refinement of mere data. Information thus is the value we extract from data. But once the idea of information overload started taking root (popularized in Alvin Toffler's 1970 Future Shock), we needed a way to characterize the value we extract from information. So we looked for something that would do to information what information did to data. Ackoff suggested knowledge as the value of information, and we collectively nodded our heads.
But, the info-to-knowledge move is far more problematic than the data-to-info one. Ask someone outside of the circle of information scientists what "information" means and you'll find that it's a hollow term. It thus was available for redefinition. But "knowledge" is one of the most important words in our culture, with a long and profound history. In the DIKW hierarchy "knowledge" slips its mooring, and that matters.
So, what is "knowledge" in the DIKW pyramid? For Ackoff, knowledge transforms "information into instructions." Milan Zeleny, who came up with the hierarchy a couple of years before Ackoff, says that knowledge is like the recipe that lets you make bread out of the information-ingredients of flour and yeast (with data as the atoms of the ingredients). The European Committee for Standardization's official "Guide to Good Practice in Knowledge Management" says: "Knowledge is the combination of data and information, to which is added expert opinion, skills and experience, to result in a valuable asset which can be used to aid decision making."
The emphasis in all these cases is on knowledge being "actionable" because of the business context, and on knowledge being a refinement of information because that's how we extracted value from data. That may be a useful way of thinking about the value of information, but it's pretty far from what knowledge has been during its 2,500 year history. Throughout that period, Plato's definition has basically held: Knowledge has been something like the set of beliefs that are true and that we are justified in believing. Indeed, we've thought that knowledge is not a mere agglomeration of true beliefs but that it reflects the systematic and even organic nature of the universe. The pieces go together and make something true and beautiful. More, knowledge has been the distinctly human project, the exercise of the highest and defining capabilities of humans, a fulfillment of our nature, a transgenerational treasure that it is each person's duty and honor to enhance.
But, nah, we needed a word to explain what good comes from our massive investment in computers, so we grabbed ahold of "knowledge" and redefined it as we had to. Then we threw "wisdom" into the mix. Bah.
And humbug. The real problem isn't the DIKW's hijacking of the word "knowledge" but its implication that knowledge derives from filtering information. It doesn't. We can learn some facts by combing through databases. We can see some true correlations by running sophisticated algorithms over massive amounts of information. All that's good.
But knowledge is not a result merely of filtering or algorithms. It results from a far more complex process that is social, goal-driven, contextual, and culturally-bound. We get to knowledge — especially "actionable" knowledge — by having desires and curiosity, through plotting and play, by being wrong more often than right, by talking with others and forming social bonds, by applying methods and then backing away from them, by calculation and serendipity, by rationality and intuition, by institutional processes and social roles. Most important in this regard, where the decisions are tough and knowledge is hard to come by, knowledge is not determined by information, for it is the knowing process that first decides which information is relevant, and how it is to be used.
The real problem with the DIKW pyramid is that it's a pyramid. The image that knowledge (much less wisdom) results from applying finer-grained filters at each level, paints the wrong picture. That view is natural to the Information Age which has been all about filtering noise, reducing the flow to what is clean, clear and manageable. Knowledge is more creative, messier, harder won, and far more discontinuous.
Harnessing Your Staff's Informal Networks - Harvard Business Review
Harnessing Your Staff's Informal Networks - Harvard Business Review: "Harnessing Your Staff’s Informal Networks"
If your smartest employees are getting together to solve problems and develop new ideas on their own, the best thing to do is to stay out of their way, right? Workers can easily share insights electronically, and they often don’t want or appreciate executive oversight. Well, think again. Though in-house networks of experts—or “communities of practice”—were once entirely unofficial, today they are increasingly integrated into companies’ formal management structures.
Independent, off-the-grid communities have proliferated in recent years, and many companies have counted on them to deliver creative solutions to challenges that bridge functional gaps. But in the past few years, outside forces—technological advances, globalization, increased demands on employees’ time—have begun to undermine communities’ success. Consider the rise and fall of an informal group of experts at a large water-engineering company located just outside London. Starting in the early 1990s, they began meeting weekly to discuss strategies for designing new water-treatment facilities. The gatherings were so lively and informative that they actually drew crowds of onlookers. (The company can’t be named for reasons of confidentiality.)
The community initially thrived because it operated so informally. United by a common professional passion, participants would huddle around conference tables and compare data, trade insights, and argue over which designs would work best with local water systems. And the community achieved results: Participants found ways to significantly cut the time and cost involved in system design by increasing the pool of experience that they could draw upon, tapping insights from different disciplines, and recycling design ideas from other projects.
Too much attention from management, went the thinking, would crush the group’s collaborative nature. But the very informality of this community eventually rendered it obsolete. What happened to it was typical: The members gained access to more sophisticated design tools and to vast amounts of data via the internet. Increased global connectivity drew more people into the community and into individual projects. Soon the engineers were spending more time at their desks, gathering and organizing data, sorting through multiple versions of designs, and managing remote contacts. The community started to feel less intimate, and its members, less obligated to their peers. Swamped, the engineers found it difficult to justify time for voluntary meetings. Today the community in effect has dissolved—along with the hopes that it would continue generating high-impact ideas.
Our research has shown that many other communities failed for similar reasons. Nevertheless, communities of practice aren’t dead. Many are thriving—you’ll find them developing global processes, resolving troubled implementation, and guiding operational efforts. But they differ from their forebears in some important respects. Today they’re an actively managed part of the organization, with specific goals, explicit accountability, and clear executive oversight. To get experts to dedicate time to them, companies have to make sure that communities contribute meaningfully to the organization and operate efficiently.
We’ve observed this shift in our consulting work and in our research. This research was conducted with the Knowledge and Innovation Network at Warwick Business School and funded by the Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre and by Schlumberger, an oil-field services company. To examine the health and impact of communities, we did a quantitative study of 52 communities in 10 industries, and a qualitative assessment of more than 140 communities in a dozen organizations, consisting of interviews with support staff, leaders, community members, and senior management.
The communities at construction and engineering giant Fluor illustrate the extent of the change. Global communities have replaced the company’s distributed functional structure. While project teams remain the primary organizational unit, 44 discipline- and industry-focused communities, with 24,000 active members, support the teams. The communities provide all functional services—creating guidelines for work practices and procedures; publishing technical documents; and offering career development, access to expert advice, and help with technical questions. They are the first and best source for technical knowledge at Fluor.
Here’s one example of how this works: Not long ago, a Fluor nuclear-cleanup project team had to install a soil barrier over a drainage field once used to dispose of radioactive wastewater. But environmental regulators mandated that Fluor first locate and seal a 30-year-old well, now covered over, to prevent contamination of the groundwater table. Poor historical data made it impossible to tell if the well really existed, and ground-penetrating radar also failed to discover it. Simply removing the contaminated soil to find the well would have been costly and risky for workers.
If your smartest employees are getting together to solve problems and develop new ideas on their own, the best thing to do is to stay out of their way, right? Workers can easily share insights electronically, and they often don’t want or appreciate executive oversight. Well, think again. Though in-house networks of experts—or “communities of practice”—were once entirely unofficial, today they are increasingly integrated into companies’ formal management structures.
Independent, off-the-grid communities have proliferated in recent years, and many companies have counted on them to deliver creative solutions to challenges that bridge functional gaps. But in the past few years, outside forces—technological advances, globalization, increased demands on employees’ time—have begun to undermine communities’ success. Consider the rise and fall of an informal group of experts at a large water-engineering company located just outside London. Starting in the early 1990s, they began meeting weekly to discuss strategies for designing new water-treatment facilities. The gatherings were so lively and informative that they actually drew crowds of onlookers. (The company can’t be named for reasons of confidentiality.)
The community initially thrived because it operated so informally. United by a common professional passion, participants would huddle around conference tables and compare data, trade insights, and argue over which designs would work best with local water systems. And the community achieved results: Participants found ways to significantly cut the time and cost involved in system design by increasing the pool of experience that they could draw upon, tapping insights from different disciplines, and recycling design ideas from other projects.
Too much attention from management, went the thinking, would crush the group’s collaborative nature. But the very informality of this community eventually rendered it obsolete. What happened to it was typical: The members gained access to more sophisticated design tools and to vast amounts of data via the internet. Increased global connectivity drew more people into the community and into individual projects. Soon the engineers were spending more time at their desks, gathering and organizing data, sorting through multiple versions of designs, and managing remote contacts. The community started to feel less intimate, and its members, less obligated to their peers. Swamped, the engineers found it difficult to justify time for voluntary meetings. Today the community in effect has dissolved—along with the hopes that it would continue generating high-impact ideas.
Our research has shown that many other communities failed for similar reasons. Nevertheless, communities of practice aren’t dead. Many are thriving—you’ll find them developing global processes, resolving troubled implementation, and guiding operational efforts. But they differ from their forebears in some important respects. Today they’re an actively managed part of the organization, with specific goals, explicit accountability, and clear executive oversight. To get experts to dedicate time to them, companies have to make sure that communities contribute meaningfully to the organization and operate efficiently.
We’ve observed this shift in our consulting work and in our research. This research was conducted with the Knowledge and Innovation Network at Warwick Business School and funded by the Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre and by Schlumberger, an oil-field services company. To examine the health and impact of communities, we did a quantitative study of 52 communities in 10 industries, and a qualitative assessment of more than 140 communities in a dozen organizations, consisting of interviews with support staff, leaders, community members, and senior management.
The communities at construction and engineering giant Fluor illustrate the extent of the change. Global communities have replaced the company’s distributed functional structure. While project teams remain the primary organizational unit, 44 discipline- and industry-focused communities, with 24,000 active members, support the teams. The communities provide all functional services—creating guidelines for work practices and procedures; publishing technical documents; and offering career development, access to expert advice, and help with technical questions. They are the first and best source for technical knowledge at Fluor.
Here’s one example of how this works: Not long ago, a Fluor nuclear-cleanup project team had to install a soil barrier over a drainage field once used to dispose of radioactive wastewater. But environmental regulators mandated that Fluor first locate and seal a 30-year-old well, now covered over, to prevent contamination of the groundwater table. Poor historical data made it impossible to tell if the well really existed, and ground-penetrating radar also failed to discover it. Simply removing the contaminated soil to find the well would have been costly and risky for workers.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Wissensmanagement 3.0
Wissensmanagement 3.0: "BarCamps"
Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung der letzten beiden Jahre hat gezeigt, dass sich Unternehmen in einem zunehmend unüberschaubareren und damit schwieriger planbaren Umfeld befinden. Hier kann die Komplexitätstheorie einerseits helfen, die eigene Situation besser beurteilen zu können und andererseits als Metapher dafür dienen das Führungsverhalten so anzupassen, dass Kreativität und Veränderungsbereitschaft im Unternehmen optimale Bedingungen vorfinden. Dies wird gleichzeitig als neues Paradigma des Wissensmanagements verstanden, dessen Vorboten in solch "komplexen" und "chaotischen" Lernarenen wie KnowledgeCamps sich abzeichnen.
Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung der letzten beiden Jahre hat gezeigt, dass sich Unternehmen in einem zunehmend unüberschaubareren und damit schwieriger planbaren Umfeld befinden. Hier kann die Komplexitätstheorie einerseits helfen, die eigene Situation besser beurteilen zu können und andererseits als Metapher dafür dienen das Führungsverhalten so anzupassen, dass Kreativität und Veränderungsbereitschaft im Unternehmen optimale Bedingungen vorfinden. Dies wird gleichzeitig als neues Paradigma des Wissensmanagements verstanden, dessen Vorboten in solch "komplexen" und "chaotischen" Lernarenen wie KnowledgeCamps sich abzeichnen.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
On data, information, knowledge and wisdom (Gurteen Knowledge)
On data, information, knowledge and wisdom (Gurteen Knowledge): "hallowed"
There has been much discussion on the web recently about the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom or DIKW hierarchy and it is described by Patrick Lambe as "that most hallowed of mental models and glib explanations".
Here is a little bit of reading for you. I have started with Patrick as I think he provides a very balanced view of the concept. Like most diagrams of this kind so much depends on how you interpret its meaning.
Personally, I have never thought of it as a model and have never tried to use it to describe any form of process of moving from one to the other. I have simply seen it as a pretty diagram and have used it when explaining the differences between, data, information and knowledge and in recent years dropped it from my slide-set.
There has been much discussion on the web recently about the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom or DIKW hierarchy and it is described by Patrick Lambe as "that most hallowed of mental models and glib explanations".
Here is a little bit of reading for you. I have started with Patrick as I think he provides a very balanced view of the concept. Like most diagrams of this kind so much depends on how you interpret its meaning.
Personally, I have never thought of it as a model and have never tried to use it to describe any form of process of moving from one to the other. I have simply seen it as a pretty diagram and have used it when explaining the differences between, data, information and knowledge and in recent years dropped it from my slide-set.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
FT.com / Technology - What IT means to me: ‘I’m a fan of IT, but I’m still a bit cynical’
FT.com / Technology - What IT means to me: ‘I’m a fan of IT, but I’m still a bit cynical’
What IT means to me: ‘I’m a fan of IT, but I’m still a bit cynical’
By Stephen Pritchard
Published: April 2 2008 02:23 | Last updated: April 2 2008 02:23
Alan Middleton has the builders in. The London headquarters of PA Consulting, where Mr Middleton is chief executive, smells of fresh paint. Hoardings in the lobby and atrium show how the new, extended offices will look, with space for more staff and – vitally – more space for meetings, too.
Perhaps surprisingly for a CEO who has done much to bring his company into the digital world, meetings matter for Mr Middleton. On his watch, PA has become one of the first management consultancies to build a presence in Second Life, the online virtual world, providing experience that PA has drawn on to build virtual worlds for clients.
Mr Middleton previously served as head of IT for PA, overseeing significant advances in the company’s technology infrastructure and its ability to support remote and mobile working. He has backed investment in knowledge management, blogging, wikis and podcasts at PA. But he still puts much store on face-to-face meetings.
“I am not fearful of IT,” he explains. “I live in a 17th century house which is fully automated: the heating, light, sound system and even the garden. I can switch on the electric blanket from Hong Kong and toast my wife! In that sense I am a fan of IT, but I’m still a bit cynical.
“I get very frustrated by people’s dependence on e-mail, and everything else that reduces personal contact, but I’ve not been able to reduce it. We are a people business and we need to bring people together.”
Connecting people, he says, should really be why large companies invest in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and knowledge management systems.
“Our system captures who was in the team that worked on a project,” he says. “We publish that information internally, so I can run a simple search to find out who knows what. At that point we have a human bond, I ring that person and say ‘give me a hand’. The human link is simple but very powerful knowledge management.”
Such systems, Mr Middleton concedes, fall short of the sophistication often demanded by the knowledge management purists, with their multi-tiered systems and complex tables of metadata that require hours of consultants’ time to fill out. Yet they work. “If you come at it purely from an IT angle, these projects will fail,” he says.
According to Mr Middleton, PA’s internal business system Mipac (management information, planning and control) is driven by one objective: to connect people.
The first generation of Mipac, created in 1995, used Microsoft Exchange for messaging and accounting; and for HR, one of the first UK installations of PeopleSoft. On top of this came KnowledgeNet, the company’s knowledge management system, and the whole was linked by a hard-wired global network at “enormous cost”.
“That was five to eight years ahead of its time,” says Mr Middleton. “We still use the same business solution, but have evolved to what you would expect: lower cost, delivering the same functionality on new technologies and over IP networks and VPNs.”
PA was also an early adopter, and advocate, of mobile working. “We had some of the early [Apple] Macs and the first Mac laptops; I ruined several suits carrying those,” recalls Mr Middleton. “Then we moved to Toshiba laptops. Within a year, we had 2,500 consultants using them. At that time, it was a genuine business advantage and a differentiator.”
The challenge for chief executives, he suggests, is to keep up with technological change and not to become too satisfied with the status quo.
“Attitudes to technology are age-dependent,” he says. “If we have a partner joining us from another firm, he or she will say that our core stuff is fabulous and makes their life hugely easier. That is the traditional role of IT.
“But our younger people have a different view. I think that this is happening everywhere: the existing generation see new joiners as anarchists, while the younger generation sees existing business people as fuddy-duddies.
“People joining see technology as bringing the capability to interact with others, an enabler for their networking and zany ideas. This is a healthy tension that will drive change.”
One example was a presentation, eight years ago, of something that looked like today’s mobile e-mail devices.
“A partner from the PA Technology Centre held up a thing that we had built: a Palmpilot with a GSM module,” says Mr Middleton.
“He told us this was the future, and that in a few years we would all have a device with a camera on it, access to our diaries and corporate e-mail. It would be a phone and we would use it to surf the web – and that it would be about the size of a cigarette packet. Many said that the chap must be past his sell-by date. But he was right.”
One way companies can learn to spot such changes is to ensure their future managers spend time in IT.
Mr Middleton firmly believes that time spent running an IT project is just as important for executives as, say, a spell in finance.
All too often, large companies ask senior executives to “sponsor” IT projects, but those executives often lack the depth of knowledge, not to mention the time, to do so effectively.
At the same time, Mr Middleton has sympathy for the plight of the CIO, who is expected to innovate but also to deliver more with less.
“In recent times, by and large, CIOs have been squeezed really hard on cost. That is in a sense counter-intuitive, as revenues and profitability have been looking great in most organisations, yet CIOs were still being pushed to cut costs. “Now, as the world wobbles, the danger for CIOs is that the very things that bring value to the bottom line, the innovative things, have been squeezed in the last six years and there is no financial or human capacity left.
“Our business leaders are saying ‘be more innovative and funky’ but there is not a lot of bandwidth to play with.”
Increasingly, companies will look beyond conventional sources of business technology to deliver that innovation. PA, for example, has turned to social networking and user-generated content to help its own business.
“We are looking at how to further our knowledge management through the power of social networking techniques – such as Facebook and Bebo – in a business context. These approaches and technologies will need to reach their second generation before they are fully usable, but they offer exciting opportunities,” he says.
PA’s excursion into virtual worlds, in the shape of Second Life, raised eyebrows both within and outside the company, but has resulted in business wins from organisations as diverse as telecoms operator Telenor and the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
“We built the Hong Kong Jockey Club in Second Life, new branch layouts for banks and have shown how it can be used to train oil tanker drivers and emergency services when responding to forecourt incidents,” Mr Middleton points out.
“We were the first management consulting firm to develop a presence in Second Life. When we started doing that, people said ‘It’s for the birds’. But I said that in 1994 about the internet. Yet within three years, you were dinosaurs if you were not online.
“I’m sure we’ve all made mistakes like that time and time again. If you don’t respond to the opportunities offered by the relentless change, then you’ll struggle.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
What IT means to me: ‘I’m a fan of IT, but I’m still a bit cynical’
By Stephen Pritchard
Published: April 2 2008 02:23 | Last updated: April 2 2008 02:23
Alan Middleton has the builders in. The London headquarters of PA Consulting, where Mr Middleton is chief executive, smells of fresh paint. Hoardings in the lobby and atrium show how the new, extended offices will look, with space for more staff and – vitally – more space for meetings, too.
Perhaps surprisingly for a CEO who has done much to bring his company into the digital world, meetings matter for Mr Middleton. On his watch, PA has become one of the first management consultancies to build a presence in Second Life, the online virtual world, providing experience that PA has drawn on to build virtual worlds for clients.
Mr Middleton previously served as head of IT for PA, overseeing significant advances in the company’s technology infrastructure and its ability to support remote and mobile working. He has backed investment in knowledge management, blogging, wikis and podcasts at PA. But he still puts much store on face-to-face meetings.
“I am not fearful of IT,” he explains. “I live in a 17th century house which is fully automated: the heating, light, sound system and even the garden. I can switch on the electric blanket from Hong Kong and toast my wife! In that sense I am a fan of IT, but I’m still a bit cynical.
“I get very frustrated by people’s dependence on e-mail, and everything else that reduces personal contact, but I’ve not been able to reduce it. We are a people business and we need to bring people together.”
Connecting people, he says, should really be why large companies invest in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and knowledge management systems.
“Our system captures who was in the team that worked on a project,” he says. “We publish that information internally, so I can run a simple search to find out who knows what. At that point we have a human bond, I ring that person and say ‘give me a hand’. The human link is simple but very powerful knowledge management.”
Such systems, Mr Middleton concedes, fall short of the sophistication often demanded by the knowledge management purists, with their multi-tiered systems and complex tables of metadata that require hours of consultants’ time to fill out. Yet they work. “If you come at it purely from an IT angle, these projects will fail,” he says.
According to Mr Middleton, PA’s internal business system Mipac (management information, planning and control) is driven by one objective: to connect people.
The first generation of Mipac, created in 1995, used Microsoft Exchange for messaging and accounting; and for HR, one of the first UK installations of PeopleSoft. On top of this came KnowledgeNet, the company’s knowledge management system, and the whole was linked by a hard-wired global network at “enormous cost”.
“That was five to eight years ahead of its time,” says Mr Middleton. “We still use the same business solution, but have evolved to what you would expect: lower cost, delivering the same functionality on new technologies and over IP networks and VPNs.”
PA was also an early adopter, and advocate, of mobile working. “We had some of the early [Apple] Macs and the first Mac laptops; I ruined several suits carrying those,” recalls Mr Middleton. “Then we moved to Toshiba laptops. Within a year, we had 2,500 consultants using them. At that time, it was a genuine business advantage and a differentiator.”
The challenge for chief executives, he suggests, is to keep up with technological change and not to become too satisfied with the status quo.
“Attitudes to technology are age-dependent,” he says. “If we have a partner joining us from another firm, he or she will say that our core stuff is fabulous and makes their life hugely easier. That is the traditional role of IT.
“But our younger people have a different view. I think that this is happening everywhere: the existing generation see new joiners as anarchists, while the younger generation sees existing business people as fuddy-duddies.
“People joining see technology as bringing the capability to interact with others, an enabler for their networking and zany ideas. This is a healthy tension that will drive change.”
One example was a presentation, eight years ago, of something that looked like today’s mobile e-mail devices.
“A partner from the PA Technology Centre held up a thing that we had built: a Palmpilot with a GSM module,” says Mr Middleton.
“He told us this was the future, and that in a few years we would all have a device with a camera on it, access to our diaries and corporate e-mail. It would be a phone and we would use it to surf the web – and that it would be about the size of a cigarette packet. Many said that the chap must be past his sell-by date. But he was right.”
One way companies can learn to spot such changes is to ensure their future managers spend time in IT.
Mr Middleton firmly believes that time spent running an IT project is just as important for executives as, say, a spell in finance.
All too often, large companies ask senior executives to “sponsor” IT projects, but those executives often lack the depth of knowledge, not to mention the time, to do so effectively.
At the same time, Mr Middleton has sympathy for the plight of the CIO, who is expected to innovate but also to deliver more with less.
“In recent times, by and large, CIOs have been squeezed really hard on cost. That is in a sense counter-intuitive, as revenues and profitability have been looking great in most organisations, yet CIOs were still being pushed to cut costs. “Now, as the world wobbles, the danger for CIOs is that the very things that bring value to the bottom line, the innovative things, have been squeezed in the last six years and there is no financial or human capacity left.
“Our business leaders are saying ‘be more innovative and funky’ but there is not a lot of bandwidth to play with.”
Increasingly, companies will look beyond conventional sources of business technology to deliver that innovation. PA, for example, has turned to social networking and user-generated content to help its own business.
“We are looking at how to further our knowledge management through the power of social networking techniques – such as Facebook and Bebo – in a business context. These approaches and technologies will need to reach their second generation before they are fully usable, but they offer exciting opportunities,” he says.
PA’s excursion into virtual worlds, in the shape of Second Life, raised eyebrows both within and outside the company, but has resulted in business wins from organisations as diverse as telecoms operator Telenor and the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
“We built the Hong Kong Jockey Club in Second Life, new branch layouts for banks and have shown how it can be used to train oil tanker drivers and emergency services when responding to forecourt incidents,” Mr Middleton points out.
“We were the first management consulting firm to develop a presence in Second Life. When we started doing that, people said ‘It’s for the birds’. But I said that in 1994 about the internet. Yet within three years, you were dinosaurs if you were not online.
“I’m sure we’ve all made mistakes like that time and time again. If you don’t respond to the opportunities offered by the relentless change, then you’ll struggle.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Knowledge-Management im Zeitalter von Web 2.0 und Open Source
Knowledge-Management im Zeitalter von Web 2.0 und Open Source
Knowledge- und Information-Management ist eine Disziplin, die Informatik-Spezialisten und -Benutzer schon lange beschäftigt, doch erst mit neuen Technologien aus dem Open- Source- und Web-2.0-Umfeld scheinen die schon früh geweckten Hoffnungen erfüllt werden zu können.
Knowledge- und Information-Management ist eine Disziplin, die Informatik-Spezialisten und -Benutzer schon lange beschäftigt, doch erst mit neuen Technologien aus dem Open- Source- und Web-2.0-Umfeld scheinen die schon früh geweckten Hoffnungen erfüllt werden zu können.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wissen und Fachkräfte in einem people_ready business
Wissen und Fachkräfte in einem people_ready business
Als Unternehmen vor Jahren versuchten, die Erfahrungen und Kenntnisse ihrer Mitarbeiter zu nutzen, sammelten sie diese Informationen in großen Datensystemen, wo sie zum Abruf bereitstanden. Doch kaum jemand griff auf das digitalisierte Wissen zu. Zu unhandlich, unstrukturiert und mit überflüssigen Informationen beladen kamen die Datenbanken daher. Zudem fürchteten die Mitarbeiter, überflüssig zu werden, wenn sie ihr persönliches Know-how dem Unternehmen und Kollegen zur Verfügung stellten. So blieb dem sogenannten Knowledge-Management der durchschlagende Erfolg verwehrt.
Als Unternehmen vor Jahren versuchten, die Erfahrungen und Kenntnisse ihrer Mitarbeiter zu nutzen, sammelten sie diese Informationen in großen Datensystemen, wo sie zum Abruf bereitstanden. Doch kaum jemand griff auf das digitalisierte Wissen zu. Zu unhandlich, unstrukturiert und mit überflüssigen Informationen beladen kamen die Datenbanken daher. Zudem fürchteten die Mitarbeiter, überflüssig zu werden, wenn sie ihr persönliches Know-how dem Unternehmen und Kollegen zur Verfügung stellten. So blieb dem sogenannten Knowledge-Management der durchschlagende Erfolg verwehrt.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
FT.com / Home UK / UK - The difficulty of managing workers who know more than you
FT.com / Home UK / UK - The difficulty of managing workers who know more than you
The difficulty of managing workers who know more than you
By Simon London
Published: August 31 2005 03:00 | Last updated: August 31 2005 03:00
It is 30 years since Peter Drucker hailed knowledge worker productivity as the great management challenge of the 20th century. By the 1960s we knew plenty about how to organise factories and logistics systems. But as the great sage of management observed, we understood next to nothing about how to get the most from doctors, lawyers,designers or marketingexecutives.
The century ended with the challenge still unmet. As Tom Davenport points out in Thinking For A Living, even today we lack "measures, methods and rules of thumb" for managing knowÂÂledge work.
This is not to say that the needs of knowledge workers have been ignored. Far from it. Knowledge management, one of the biggest management ideas of the 1990s, aimed to provide knowledge workers with the information they needed when they needed it. Similarly, investment in information technology ranging from simplee-mail to complex "customer relationship management" systems have been justified in the name of knowledge worker productivity.
But do the hours we spend answering e-mails make us more productive? How can this be measured? Is there a definition of "productive" that takes into account not only the quantity but also the quality of our output?
No wonder, remarks Davenport, that many employers resort to HSPALTA: hire smart people and leave them alone. The professor of management at Babson College, Massachusetts, is well placed to survey the ways in which organisations might get beyond HSPALTA.
In a career spent flitting between academia and consulting he has been involved in research projects studying everything from office architecture to information systems management.
Along the way, he wrote the first book on business process re-engineering (Process Innovation, 1992) and one of the best books on knowledge management (Working Knowledge, 1997, co-authored with Larry Prusak).
In his latest book he says that knowledge workers tend to share certain characteristics. Either highly educated or experienced, they hate being told what to do. They are reluctant to share knowledge. They usually have good reasons for working in the ways they do, although these are likelyto become apparent only after detailed observation.
In sum, they are a management consultant's worst nightmare. This explains why bone-headed attempts to re-engineer knowledge work always end in failure. It also explains why knowÂÂledge management systems, customer relationship management systems and other technology-driven "tools" are often ignored.
This is not to argue that knowledge workers cannot be managed, just that managers need to be much more egalitarian and participative than is the norm in industrial settings. Hard as it may be, managers must accept that their notional subordinates probably know more than they do.
Thinking For A Living then looks at some of the factors known to have an impact on the productivity of knowledge workers, including the way their work is organised, the information technology systems they use and their socialnetworks.
One of Davenport's virtues as a management writer is a refusal to over-claim or boil down complex topics into simplistic formulas. For example, he asks whether process improvement techniques from manufacturing, such as Total Quality Management and Six Sigma, can be applied to knowledge work. His answer is that with certain types of knowledge work, such as call centres, it can help.
But he knows from experience that independent-minded professionals will resist vigorously the idea that their jobs can be reduced to a series of "process steps".
There is the rub: knowledge work comes in many different varieties. Call centre operators are knowledge workers. So too are management consultants, software engineers and teachers. What works in one context may backfire terribly in another.
Davenport's willingness to address the complexity of the topic makes this book worth reading. It also helps explain why such an erudite author has never achieved the superstar status of many lesser writers. Thankfully, in business book publishing, as in software engineering or brain surgery, quality still counts for something.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
The difficulty of managing workers who know more than you
By Simon London
Published: August 31 2005 03:00 | Last updated: August 31 2005 03:00
It is 30 years since Peter Drucker hailed knowledge worker productivity as the great management challenge of the 20th century. By the 1960s we knew plenty about how to organise factories and logistics systems. But as the great sage of management observed, we understood next to nothing about how to get the most from doctors, lawyers,designers or marketingexecutives.
The century ended with the challenge still unmet. As Tom Davenport points out in Thinking For A Living, even today we lack "measures, methods and rules of thumb" for managing knowÂÂledge work.
This is not to say that the needs of knowledge workers have been ignored. Far from it. Knowledge management, one of the biggest management ideas of the 1990s, aimed to provide knowledge workers with the information they needed when they needed it. Similarly, investment in information technology ranging from simplee-mail to complex "customer relationship management" systems have been justified in the name of knowledge worker productivity.
But do the hours we spend answering e-mails make us more productive? How can this be measured? Is there a definition of "productive" that takes into account not only the quantity but also the quality of our output?
No wonder, remarks Davenport, that many employers resort to HSPALTA: hire smart people and leave them alone. The professor of management at Babson College, Massachusetts, is well placed to survey the ways in which organisations might get beyond HSPALTA.
In a career spent flitting between academia and consulting he has been involved in research projects studying everything from office architecture to information systems management.
Along the way, he wrote the first book on business process re-engineering (Process Innovation, 1992) and one of the best books on knowledge management (Working Knowledge, 1997, co-authored with Larry Prusak).
In his latest book he says that knowledge workers tend to share certain characteristics. Either highly educated or experienced, they hate being told what to do. They are reluctant to share knowledge. They usually have good reasons for working in the ways they do, although these are likelyto become apparent only after detailed observation.
In sum, they are a management consultant's worst nightmare. This explains why bone-headed attempts to re-engineer knowledge work always end in failure. It also explains why knowÂÂledge management systems, customer relationship management systems and other technology-driven "tools" are often ignored.
This is not to argue that knowledge workers cannot be managed, just that managers need to be much more egalitarian and participative than is the norm in industrial settings. Hard as it may be, managers must accept that their notional subordinates probably know more than they do.
Thinking For A Living then looks at some of the factors known to have an impact on the productivity of knowledge workers, including the way their work is organised, the information technology systems they use and their socialnetworks.
One of Davenport's virtues as a management writer is a refusal to over-claim or boil down complex topics into simplistic formulas. For example, he asks whether process improvement techniques from manufacturing, such as Total Quality Management and Six Sigma, can be applied to knowledge work. His answer is that with certain types of knowledge work, such as call centres, it can help.
But he knows from experience that independent-minded professionals will resist vigorously the idea that their jobs can be reduced to a series of "process steps".
There is the rub: knowledge work comes in many different varieties. Call centre operators are knowledge workers. So too are management consultants, software engineers and teachers. What works in one context may backfire terribly in another.
Davenport's willingness to address the complexity of the topic makes this book worth reading. It also helps explain why such an erudite author has never achieved the superstar status of many lesser writers. Thankfully, in business book publishing, as in software engineering or brain surgery, quality still counts for something.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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