"If only we knew what we know." Those words from Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, reflect a tough truth about most organizations: the knowledge and the know-how of their workforce is too often underused - bottled up like Aladdin's genie. The business pays penalties in its performance today and its ability to master change for tomorrow.

When a business organization doesn't know what it knows, it doesn't perform as well as it could…or should. It pays a price in the three key business disciplines of customer focus, operational excellence and innovation.

	•	Customer Focus Is Fuzzy: When a business doesn't share its knowledge and know-how, selling opportunities are lost, customer care suffers, and new markets are not penetrated. Feedback from the sales force doesn't get back to marketing, and too often new product development is not well aligned with either.
	•	Operational Excellence Isn't Shared: It's great when one business unit of the organization figures new ways to deliver more, at less cost. But if other business units never hear about it, the impact on the bottom line is marginal when it could have been dramatic. This disconnect between left-hand and right-hand happens even if business units are across town, not just when they're globally dispersed.
	•	Innovations Are Ignored: Is there any question that innovative ideas can and do bubble up in every area of every company? Capturing those innovations isn't important only to high-tech players. Great example: Rockport developed a major new market for their walking shoes after one of their uniformed security guards said he'd wear them to work if only they were available in a dressier style.

Organizations pay a "Dilbert" tax when knowledge workers aren't empowered to share what they know. The wild success of Scott Adams' comic strip, and the fact that he gets most of his material from the front lines of corporate America, says a lot about how frustrated and demoralized too many of our highly intelligent, highly paid knowledge workers really are. Motivational malaise is the hidden penalty organizations pay for not bothering to learn how to share their people's knowledge and know-how effectively.

Which companies would you bet on? In any market, some companies will inadvertently stifle the genius of their knowledge workforce. Others will figure out ways to set it free. Which ones are more likely to achieve performance breakthroughs and competitive advantage? Which are likely to stumble and fall? And how often is current competitive advantage sustainable?

Yesterday's T-Rex is often today's fossil. Analysis over time of which publicly traded companies have been in the broad market indices show that historic competitive advantage cannot be sustained. So while today's markets belong to companies with competitive advantage, the future belongs companies with adaptive advantage - the ability to master change. Very few companies do that well.

Why is it so hard to succeed at change? For 20 years, John P. Kotter has studied companies attempting change. In Leading Change (Harvard Business School Press), he explains why so few succeed:

	•	Successful change requires more leadership and less management than he found in the business culture of most companies.
	•	Business leaders often underestimate how difficult it is to begin a major change initiative…and then sustain it.
	•	They also too often forget that joke about eating the elephant one bite at a time. Major change is successfully accomplished through a series of small steps supported by massive communications from senior management about their strategic importance.

Learning to Fly is the story of how British Petroleum went from not-so-good to great by learning how to share what they know. In his introduction to the book, BP's CEO Sir John Browne said, "Just imagine what we could achieve if we all knew what each one of us knows". Doesn't that sound just like Lew Platt's remarks about HP, "If only we knew what we know"?

Your organization can learn to fly too. Ways to do it better, faster and cheaper are hidden in the knowledge and practical know-how of your people. Regardless of what mix of products and services you sell, your business is part of the 21st century knowledge economy.

The specifics are different because every company is different. Some get smarter about sharing knowledge because they stumble. Others proactively decide they want to learn to swim BEFORE the boat starts sinking. Either way, these best of breed companies don't do their knowledge sharing in a monkey-see monkey-do way. Their knowledge sharing solutions FIT their people and process…and so can yours.

The common denominator is leadership that ties clear vision to the bottom line: It's all about boosting performance now…and developing a pattern of adaptive behavior for the long haul.

What will motivate your knowledge workforce? Douglas McGregor, in Leadership and Motivation (M.I.T. Press), explains, "Management by direction and control - whether implemented with the hard, the soft, or the firm but fair approach - fails under today's conditions to provide effective motivation of human efforts toward organizational objectives. It fails because direction and control are useless methods of motivating people whose physiological and safety needs are reasonably satisfied and whose social, egoistic and self-fulfillment needs are predominant".

By empowering people to share their knowledge and know-how, a business organization becomes the "Anti-Dilbert". When their intrinsic, internal motivators are activated, knowledge workers' motivation skyrockets. Their passion translates into organizational performance. That's what happens in organizations that understand what really makes today's knowledge worker tick. They don't pay a "Dilbert" tax anymore.

Learning to share knowledge and know-how can make a good company into a great company. Imagine if your highly paid and highly skilled knowledge workers were highly motivated AND highly empowered to share their knowledge and their know-how on an ongoing basis?

	•	Would you get more customers? Do a better job cross-selling them? Keep them longer? Get more referrals?
	•	Would innovations, large and small, that could make a real difference be more likely to get serious attention regardless of where in the organization they originate?
	•	Would your operations be more lean and less mean?
	•	Would you deliver more, at less cost, if only you knew what you know?

So why don't more organizations leverage knowledge and know-how to gain competitive advantage? Ignorance, skepticism and doubt are three big reasons.

	•	Ignorance: If you don't know the success stories you won't prioritize knowledge sharing. The compelling case studies are out there. But if your leadership team doesn't hear about them, you'll miss the acres of diamonds sitting in your own back yard.
	•	Skepticism: Some expensive first-generation of knowledge sharing initiatives failed to produce much ROI. Larry Prusak of IBM noted that as many as 50% of the knowledge management projects he had reviewed were "deeply sub-optimized". Those kinds of odds aren't appealing to a risk-conscious manager.
	•	Doubt: You might be thinking, "Maybe knowledge sharing just isn't for us." Maybe it's not. It's certainly legitimate to wonder about organizational readiness.

The only thing we're sure of is that unless your market is shrinking, your competition is growing. Your smart competition will get smarter. Your really smart competition will learn how to share the knowledge and know-how of their workforce. The answer to those doubts about organizational readiness? Just do it, and get smarter, and do it some more. There's just no other way to stay in the game.

The good news is that lessons learned are being leveraged for second-generation success. Nimble multi-nationals and fast moving smaller companies alike are applying these critical lessons to their knowledge sharing initiatives:

	•	Align KM projects to key business needs (obvious but often overlooked).
	•	Avoid a monolithic, one size fits all, top-down approach (any more than you would for data bases or data warehouses).
	•	Focus on people and process.
	•	Measure performance results.

Lessons learned from first generation knowledge management failures point out some "gotchas" to be aware of, and probably avoid.

	•	Watch out for analysis paralysis. Too many expensive and time-consuming knowledge audits are gathering dust in cubicles right now. Too many knowledge maps have provided little direction for organizations who want to get somewhere fast in terms of performance benefits today.
	•	Don't leave your knowledge workforce out of the solution design loop. If your knowledge sharing solutions are imposed ON your knowledge workforce rather than emerging FROM your knowledge workforce, don't expect ROI anyone will get excited about.

To get the kind of benefit you're looking for, think about your knowledge initiative as a "three link chain" of actions: define, discover, and deliver. The effective strength of your initiative is only going to be as strong as the weakest link:

	•	Link #1: Define the most valuable knowledge sharing initiatives by looking at your organization's biggest challenges and opportunities. Pick at key points of pain and potential to make a measurable difference in performance right away. Later, as the organization gets better at sharing what it knows, benefits will come from all kinds of unexpected people and places.
	•	Link #2: Use your knowledge workforce to discover one or more solutions that really make sense in your organization. Post-mortems on many projects show that this is most often the weak link in the chain. Solutions imposed "top-down" by management or "outside-in" by consultants are high risk: the probability of a good fit and enthusiastic, widespread adoption is low. Let the buyer beware.
	•	Link #3: Deliver, measure, tweak. Good intentions need to be matched with disciplined execution. That means delivering specific projects (which don't necessarily have to cost a bundle in new IT infrastructure), measuring the performance benefit, and tweaking the processes based on feedback from the knowledge workers, end users and customers.

Finally, celebrate success. Best of breed knowledge sharing companies make celebration of knowledge sharing success an integral part of their corporate culture. Celebrating success creates an upward spiral of motivation and action to exceed historic performance goals by further leveraging knowledge and know-how all across the company.

The principals of Spiral Partners have been helping companies share knowledge and know-how since the mid-90's. Our implementation of the "Three-Link Chain" approach is remarkably quick and effective. Just as important, it can easily be re-used across your organization.

We stand behind our services in a way few companies do. We know of no other consulting firm, large or small, that will make this statement: If you're not delighted with us and our services, just tear up our bill.

So if you're ready to turn your knowledge sharing opportunities into performance advantage, contact us. We'll talk about what we do, how we do it, and why it works so well. Because our fee is on the line, you can be sure that we'll tell you the truth about whether we think our approach can deliver performance ROI for you and your organization.