by Galen McPherson

   This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter 

So there I was… driving all along FM 1960 [that's a road name, for all you non-Texans] looking all over for the Dunkin’ Donuts that Mapquest told me would be there.  Finally, I called Nancy Johnson, my coffee partner, to let her know that I was late, I had been unable to locate the place, but I was looking.  When she answered, she told me that she was also driving up and down 1960, also unable to find Dunkin’ Donuts either.  Darn Mapquest.  So we agreed on Starbuck’s, which we were both somehow near, with another lesson learned about today’s electronic world.

This was a marathon cuppa, not that we noticed until too late, almost three hours, but most enjoyable.  Nancy and I have both been struggling with a bit of “personal” re-invention this last year, having been let go from our separate previous employers at the start of the new year, a circumstance not unfamiliar to a great many Americans.

We are similarly aged, and seeking corporate employment was most often met with the “over-qualified” euphemism, creating quite a bit of angst and anguish.  We were, at our advanced maturity…  well, age, because I certainly cannot consistently claim maturity… having to decide “what we wanted to be when we grew up“.  We had to re-invent how we looked at ourselves, driven by how others looked at us.  Inside, I am still 25, immortal and sporting the body I inhabited while flying fighters and carousing in Korea- I have no idea how that overweight grey-haired guy gets inside my mirror.

We talked about the struggles of learning new skills, particularly the ubiquity and variety of electronic social media - so critical to today’s networking candidate.  Skype, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Naymz… and those are only a few of the myriad options available.  We talked about blogging and what it takes to get into that, and then there is website design and upkeep, and on and on and on.  I had decided simply to jump in, to go get started, but Nancy had found herself a bit more hesitant, wanting to research it “just a little bit more” to “make sure [she] was doing it right”.

That is when a favorite admonition from a friend of mine from long long ago came to mind - “Anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly at first”.  If you want to be “good” at social media marketing, you will have to be bad at first.  You will make faux pas, you will goober up your Twitter account, you will forget the eighty-five new passwords you create [some with caps, some with letters, some not], you will try to make a connection on LinkedIn by signing in to Facebook.  Trust me- I have “been there, done that”.  But all these applications are amazingly forgiving [I can delete the pages I don't like] and the community of users is amazingly supportive and receptive.

So we came around full circle to the adage-esque Nike slogan of “Just Do It”.  Social media is the “new thing” especially to us “boomers”, but it is the new thing.

We have to become adept at using it.

Even though we will be poor at using it at first

Galen McPherson is an unabashed Intellectual Capitalist, specializing in knowledge systems optimization. Every company has a knowledge system.  Usually, though, the knowledge system is not a designed feature but one that simply “happened” over time. His work can help ensure that you provide the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format.  He can be reached at 832.298.4940 and galen@galenmcpherson.com.  His profile is on LinkedIn and Facebook, and his blog can be found at www.galenmcpherson.com.

Better knowledge.  Faster.

by Galen McPherson

   This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter 

I believe that we have all heard some form of the expression that “once you have opened up a can of worms, the only way to get them all back in is to open a bigger can”.

I was reviewing Polyani’s early writings on tacit knowledge recently (read on!), and I came across a theory that begins to explain this phenomenon, at least partially.  In his discussions of “knowledge emergence”, Polyani refers to the biological sense of the word, different from the later use by Nonaka and Nishiguchi.

In a nutshell, this theory of emergence posits that strata “emerge” in biological terms, in order to control or adapt to the weaknesses and incompleteness of the preceding stratum.

Before everyone dozes off, if it’s not already too late, let me use the same metaphor that he used to explain these strata: human speech.

The human voice is needed to form words, through phonetics.  Words form into sentences through lexicography.  Sentences create a certain style dependent on the operation of grammar.  Stylistic interpretation forms this into a composition, which can lead to literary criticism.  Each level is needed in order to proceed to the next, but it cannot achieve the aim of the next.  Each level fails when the elements of the lower level are not well-controlled.

So, what does this have to do with knowledge?  In this theory of knowledge “emergence”, no level can gain control over its own boundary conditions, therefore it cannot bring a higher level into existence, because the operations of the higher level serve to control the lower. Using this model, we now understand the “common sense” notion that most new advances, big advances, in knowledge come from the fringes of a discipline, not from the core.

A higher level can only come into being through a process which is not manifest in the lower level, and this process qualifies as an “emergence”.  This ongoing development of superior strata from inadequate particular strata is “the unquenchable thirst, the eternal conundrum of learning”.

All this just goes to explain why it seems that the creation of new knowledge is usually very messy.  The world is full of accidental discoveries and developments: penicillin, Post-It Notes, the benzene ring.  Not orderly emergence, mechanical and robotic, but biological emergence, surprising, serendipitous.

Knowledge creation, the emergence of completely new concepts, true innovation cannot take place at the core of a discipline.  That particular discipline can be improved from within, but to be leapfrogged, a new level must emerge.

This is neither haphazard nor random; there is a distinct interrelationship between the two levels.  The principles of each level of knowledge operate under the control of the next level, therefore, each level is subject to dual control:
- first, by the laws that apply to the elements of the particular level
- second, by the laws that then govern the comprehensive entity formed by these particular elements

It becomes impossible to represent the organizing principles of a higher level by the laws governing the lower level, and therefore a new body of knowledge emerges.  Theories are disproven, and new theories emerge in their place.  The success of this new theory, this new level, is inherent in itself and its completeness, yet the vulnerability of failure of this theory or new level lies in the performance of its subordinate level

Biologically we see this when we think of evolution not so much an example of selective advantage winning out [man that could walk upright did not immediately displace man that could not] but instead an indication of avoiding failure [all men that could NOT walk upright eventually died out, allowing the upright man to expand his presence].

In the knowledge arena, new and old strata can co-exist, and “old” knowledge will persist even as “new” knowledge emerges.  The new will not drive out the old; it is only when the old can no longer survive, that the new is free to fill in the voids that the absence of the old created.  This new will also control the boundaries of the old, through laws and relationships that had been unapparent earlier but seem obvious now.

And that is the beauty, and the messiness, of opening up that can of worms.

Until next time…  what are you thinking?

Galen McPherson is an unabashed Intellectual Capitalist, and developer of the K’Nexus model of knowledge systems.  He believes firmly that every company’s most important asset walks out the door every night, and the owners only hope that it returns in the morning.  With over thirty years in training and adult education, coupled with strong business process improvement credentials internationally, Galen brings an interesting, refreshing, and most importantly profitable angle to how you will view the brainpower of your employees in the future.  He can be reached at (832) 298-4094 and galenmcp@att.net.  His profile is on LinkedIn, and Facebook, and he and his partner have a website at www.intellcap.biz.

by Galen McPherson

   This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter 

For the company in need of new knowledge, whether for a specific project or for its ultimate survival, this is the first question that needs to be addressed: how do we choose to gain this new knowledge? We can buy it, and many companies actively pursue mergers and acquisitions with a specific eye to the technologies [a substitute for knowledge, but often only its most apparent artifact]. Some companies seem to feel that it is some form of “cheating” if you don’t develop it yourself, so they pursue the “build” option, often at great expense with unpredictable outcomes. Lastly, one can “borrow” the knowledge, my normal contribution, which involves engaging a consultant, for a specific time and a specific task, using that person’s knowledge and then relinquishing any claim to the owner of that knowledge.

Which strategy is best for you? As I have said before, the answer, as it always is, is “It depends”. “Buy” may be the fastest path available, although “borrow” can happen pretty darn fast. “Build” is crucial if the company wants an exclusive knowledge that no one else can claim. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each, and then discuss my favorite option, copying Rent-A-Center, “rent-to-own”.

In their book, “Working Knowledge”, Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak devote an entire chapter to this discussion, including even more models for knowledge development. It’s Chapter Three for any of you that want to go look at this further.

Only in the knowledge industry, though, could “theft” be considered a form of “buy”. Due to the non-consumable nature of knowledge, “stealing” knowledge from another company does not diminish their store at all, but it does increase yours. Acquisition, whether theft or purchase, provides an immediate boost to your knowledge base, or so it would seem. The caution I would offer is that only the explicit knowledge of the company can be acquired – the tacit knowledge resident in the employees’ crania remains where it has always resided, in the respective heads of the users. However, Dorothy Leonard-Barton, in her book, “Wellsprings of Knowledge”, describes an attempt to buy the knowledge of a competitor through acquisition that went wrong simply because the line employees having the knowledge were not retained, only the explicit knowledge artifacts of the involved processes. So, acquisition, whether “theft” or “purchase” does include a due diligence requirement to ensure that the knowledge sought is being transferred.

Then there is the engineer’s dream, build it ourselves. And before anyone feels they should pillory me for running down the engineering profession, let me say that I have an engineering degree myself, and this critique is offered with the greatest of understanding and compassion. But it is still often an unnecessarily expensive proposition, undertaken for ego or other reasons. Research and Development is an expensive process, and its outcome is very uncertain. While preserving the image of a company as an innovator, can the company absorb the duplicate costs of development in order to enforce a “not invented here” bias? A key observation of mine, and an underlying principle in my work on knowledge management, is that “applicability trumps originality” every time. I champion the “NIHBIDIA” award program, developed by Texas Instruments, at every opportunity in my consultancy [“Not Invented Here But I Did It Anywhere”]. If the knowledge that you need is available from another source, why go through the process to develop it [re-develop it] yourself, unless there is value in developing the know-how that extends BEYOND the actual knowledge itself? The limitation to “build” in my mind is a triple-headed hydra of time, expense and uncertainty.

Then comes “borrow”, or in Davenport/Prusak’s terminology, “rental”. Renting knowledge provides an immediate resource that can be used then released at relatively low cost to the acquiring party. A company will often hire someone like me to apply what I know to a particular circumstance they are facing. There is inevitably some degree of knowledge transfer in that arrangement, because the solutions that I, or any other responsive consultant, offer will contain embedded knowledge as well as being accompanied by some explicit knowledge artifacts relating to the solution. What amazes me is how often the client accepts my “what to do” recommendation, and implements it successfully, without questioning the “why” behind it.

I think that some of my clients feel that they are not entitled to the knowledge behind the solution, only the solution. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not going to be giving away any of my “core competencies” or “trade secrets”, proprietary intellectual capital that I have developed through years of work and experience. But at the same time, I feel that the customer has every right to ask me to explain the “metaknowledge” – the knowledge behind the knowledge – to the degree that I am willing to share it. And this is the essence of what I call a “rent-to-own” program.

Every company that is “renting” its knowledge from a consultant owes it to its shareholders to retain as much of the rented knowledge as can be arranged. Whether this is done up front, in the scope of the project, stipulating that the background knowledge and processes will be communicated as well as the outcome, or if it done on an “ad hoc” basis between the hiring company’s resident experts and the engaged consultant, is a matter of business protocol and preference. But I also feel that failing to ask the question is an inexcusable lapse by the hiring company.

And as Donald Trump once said during an interview, “You don’t get a peanut if you don’t hold out your hand”.

Until next time… what are you thinking?

Galen McPherson is an unabashed Intellectual Capitalist, and developer of the K’Nexus model of knowledge exchange. He believes firmly that every company’s most important asset walks out the door every night, and the owners only hope that it returns in the morning. With over thirty years in training and adult education, coupled with strong business process improvement credentials internationally, Galen brings an interesting, refreshing, and most importantly profitable angle to how you will view the brainpower of your employees in the future. He can be reached at 832.298.4940 and galen@intellcap.biz. His profile is on LinkedIn and Facebook, and he and his partner operate the website http://www.intellcap.biz.

by Galen McPherson

   This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter

I don’t think that you need to have a rural or Midwestern upbringing to appreciate the saw that discusses the merits of closing a barn door after the horse is gone.  Usually discovery of the absence of a favorite equine companion does generate such a response, however, regardless of its highly evident insensibility.

In the highly elusive world of intellectual capital protection, most companies strenuously avoid opening any barn doors, especially on sensitive information or proprietary knowledge.  The provisions range from the alleged practice that only two people know the real formula for Coca-Cola, and each only knows half to strenuous copyright and patent protections that make litigating lawyers salivate, holders breathe easily and potential violators cringe.  Really, only the attorneys have the right to their response, because the sense of security that copyright/patent brings is often false, not nearly so “fireproof” as imagined.

In conversations with a client the other day, we were discussing the company’s most critical core competencies.  We were considering a number of activities: valuating this competency, capturing and documenting the knowledge it represented, and eventually we got around to protecting it as a resource.  We discussed several options, several of which would hold promise, none of which were impregnable, each with its own special and personal Achilles heel.

The conversation turned, as it usually does – because I always ask the question – to “what will you do when this knowledge is compromised?”  Never “if” it is compromised, but “when”.  Some breaches take longer than others, but the knowledge is always compromised, eventually.  A disgruntled employee, a competitor’s research breakthrough, simple reverse engineering, any of these options will result in a compromise.  Then each company leader must know what to do.

The time of the breach is not the time to try to decide what to do- have it planned out ahead of time.  There are so many factors that need to be considered in reaction to knowledge breach, and the guidance through the maze, and the ultimate selection of options, can be a laborious effort.  Without fail, a suggestion that I always make is met with disbelief and shock.  My proposition?  When you discover that knowledge which you intended would be protected and held in strictest confidence has been exposed, amplify the exposure.

Forget closing the barn door, throw it wide open!!  Make sure that your other “protected” horses are “in their stalls”, but as far as the one that is out, make it very public.  Think about it for just a second.  The reason you protected the horse was because it gave you a unique value.  You have capitalized on that unique value for all the while that that horse was protected.  Now someone else wants to profiteer from your horse, a horse they are sharing without your permission.  Since your profitability is now compromised, rather than let your competitor profit from your knowledge, make your knowledge general.  Make it available.  Be seen as a benefactor.  And meanwhile, you are undermining the exclusivity of the knowledge, the value it contained due to its scarcity, and reducing the ability of your competitor to profit from your horse.

It is not always that straightforward, but it is amazing, and satisfying to me – and quite honestly, satisfying to my clients – when they realize that what shocked them initially has so many positive outcomes for them.  And downsides for the “thief”.

Sharing the knowledge opens up all sorts of new avenues for development and enrichment – companies benefitting from your publication of knowledge may be more apt to share with you as they develop the knowledge further; even if the sharing is not altogether straightforward, your release may lead others to further enhancements in the discipline that you would not have pursued.

Your intellectual assets are crucial to your company’s success and survival.  These assets should be valued and protected as is appropriate, but once the horse is gone, there is no need to shut the barn door

Until next time… what are you thinking?

Galen McPherson is an unabashed Intellectual Capitalist, and developer of the K’Nexus model of knowledge exchange.  He believes firmly that every company’s most important asset walks out the door every night, and the owners only hope that it returns in the morning.  With over thirty years in training and adult education, coupled with strong business process improvement credentials internationally, Galen brings an interesting, refreshing, and most importantly profitable angle to how you will view the brainpower of your employees in the future.  He can be reached at 832.298.4940 and galen@intellcap.biz.  His profile is on LinkedIn and Facebook, and he and his partner operate the website www.intellcap.biz.

by Galen McPherson

This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter

An eternal question: do I have to develop or, must I discover, the “next big step”?  Whichever is true will direct the way I invest my energies and resources, no matter what I am undertaking.  Normally, development is the desired answer because that gives everyone involved a sense of control and predictability.  But headlines are grabbed by leaps of intuition, by flashes of genius, and not by methodical improvement.

It is a rarity when a game-changing knowledge product emerges through discovery, almost by sheer accident, and I am comfortable telling all who will listen that if you want a new market-altering knowledge product, you will have to, as in “Field of Dreams”, build it, and they will come.  The beauty is that it can be done; the downfall is that too many people start “too late” in the chain.

You see, knowledge product development is the last stop along the way, the fourth in a sequence that begins in dim recesses and fundamental strategies of the organization.  You cannot reliably simply announce that “we will develop thus-and-such a knowledge product”.  There are too many pitfalls along the way, pitfalls that can only be ignored at great peril.

As Thomas Stewart explains in his book, “Intellectual Capital”, the correct sequence for knowledge product development is built on the belief that: principles precede processes, processes precede projects, and projects precede products.  And that is because products die, projects end, and processes adapt; only principles endure.

I have five underlying principles that guided me in the development of the KnexusTM model for knowledge exchange, a true knowledge product:
• The creation of new knowledge is ultimately an individual action.
• Tacit knowledge is the only form of knowledge that makes it to the workplace, but explicit knowledge is the only form that can be exchanged.
• The knowledge economy is first and foremost an economy.
• It’s connection, not collection, which matters.
• If the knowledge you provide is not what the customer is buying, you won’t sell a thing.

Using these principles, I advanced to developing critical processes that would be needed to prosecute a knowledge strategy successfully, some of which are:
• Knowledge sharing
• Innovation and invention
• Customer learning
• Staff development
 
These processes gave over very easily to identifiable projects to be pursued, such as:
• Knowledge and expertise maps for clients
• Building communities of practice within work spaces
• Building and mining knowledge bases within the organization
• Reusing knowledge that already existed
• Creating new knowledge assets
which in turn led to these distinct product activities:
• Developing products with embedded [distilled] knowledge
• “Smart” products and services
• Distilling and selling “raw knowledge” as a product
• Selling “knowledge consumables”, and
• Leveraging intellectual property assets

Whatever your field, whatever your expertise, you can follow these steps above, allowing you to build, intentionally, knowledge products that not only meet your customers’ needs but also are unique to you as a provider.  Knowledge products are made, not born; developed not discovered; sweated out and not stumbled upon.  But the key to success is to start at the beginning, not at the end, of the chain.

Until next time… what are you thinking?

Galen McPherson is an unabashed Intellectual Capitalist, and developer of the KnexusTM model of knowledge exchange.  He believes firmly that every company’s most important asset walks out the door every night, and the owners only hope that it returns in the morning.  With over thirty years in training and adult education, coupled with strong business process improvement credentials internationally, Galen brings an interesting, refreshing, and most importantly profitable angle to how you will view the brainpower of your employees in the future.  He can be reached at (816) 678-5163 and galenmcp@att.net, and his profile is on www.linkedin.com.

by Galen McPherson

   This article was published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter

As an old movie buff, I still remember that line from a John Wayne movie, probably “The Alamo”, where he had just been witness to a parade of dandily-attired spit-shined troops marching in front of the reviewing stand.  That question should ring through the ages in all of its allegorical glory, no matter what you undertake.  When it comes to deciding whether or not to create a knowledge product [or any product, for that matter], the question instead becomes:

“Very pretty, but does it add value that the customer will pay for?

If you are a frequent reader of my articles, please forgive this brief restatement, but for the newcomers to my work , one of the founding principles of my KnexusTM model of knowledge exchange is that: “The knowledge economy is, first and foremost, an economy.”  The meaning and value of intellectual capital can only be realized in the marketplace.  Even internal processes must be managed so that they serve markets and customers as directly as possible.

Not only is the knowledge economy an economy in its own right, it also fosters other “economies”, similar to what we see in other industries:

• Economies of scale in allowing the same information to be used in mass settings as a knowledge consumable within a product,
• Economies of scope in allowing the same information to be transported to other products, and
• Economies of skill in allowing intelligent customized solutions to be delivered more cost effectively by increasing their knowledge content.

The frontiersmen at the Alamo could all fight, never mind looking pretty.  Among these defenders, there were no buglers [only], no flag bearers [only], no drummers [only].  This force of men included all of, but only, the necessities to fight.  No bells and whistles and no unnecessary “features” were to be found within the mission walls.  But each man there could shoot a musket, each man could reload, each man could handle the light cannon, most men had a knife- these were multi-purpose fighters.  The “fighting knowledge” within the Alamo was as widely dispersed as possible.

So it must be with your knowledge- as widely dispersed as possible.  Within my consulting practice, I have a motto that we all live by: “Never sell any knowledge only once.”  The beauty of the knowledge economy is that it doesn’t have to follow many of the rules of scarcity economics.  Forget the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith, to a degree.  The beauty of the knowledge economy is that none of the raw materials, knowledge, are ever consumed, only replicated.  For the first time in an economy, mass production has virtually NO incremental cost.

At the Alamo, if we only had seven hundred musket balls for 183 shooters, every musket ball that I “dispersed” to a comrade was one ball fewer for me.  But with knowledge, even though I give ALL my knowledge to my comrade, I still have all that I started with, maybe even more if I learned something during the exchange.  Knowledge is a true non-consumable resource.

That’s not to say that it is non-perishable, because it is.  There is not much call for the detailed knowledge of buggy whip manufacture these days.  The need for a specific application of knowledge may be overcome by events, but if there becomes an application for that knowledge in the future, it is still there and still true and still non-consumable.

All is not utopia in the knowledge product economy: unlike our manufacturing brethren, since we are dealing with an invisible and intangible product, we have significantly higher front-end costs on our product development.  The need for “thorough” design and for even more thorough testing, especially for critical decision-support knowledge systems, requires an ability to anticipate almost beyond human measure.  Test marketing of knowledge products tends to be long in duration and convoluted, as myriad scenarios, many even highly improbable but still present, must be validated. 

All the issues of product marketing apply to knowledge products, just as they do to any other.  Knowledge product market segmentation opens up two strategies:

• Knowledge “consumables”- upgrades or updates bought to refresh earlier knowledge products, much like the continual releases of Microsoft Office applications and other software products
• Popular first, then specialist – early knowledge “products” used to trickle down from professional user or corporate gurus, including specialized analytical techniques and models; now they are often just as likely to be have been created by a user and then percolated upward, especially with wiki and so-called “Web 2.0” approaches

The biggest source of frustration in determining a knowledge product development strategy lies in determining whence the inspiration for new products comes.  Oftentimes the answer, and it’s the wrong answer, is that is comes from looking at our [knowledge-producing company] capabilities.  We become enamored of our own expertise, and we refine that expertise, becoming smarter and smarter in a select area.  It only makes sense that we will know more, and therefore find the better solution more easily, than an outsider.

You will find new knowledge product opportunities, not by looking at your own value chain, but by looking at that of your customers.  Otherwise, you will have “very pretty” solutions that look good on the parade ground, but cannot fight.

Until next time… what are you thinking?

Galen McPherson is an unabashed Intellectual Capitalist, and developer of the KnexusTM model of knowledge exchange.  He believes firmly that every company’s most important asset walks out the door every night, and the owners only hope that it returns in the morning.  With over thirty years in training and adult education, coupled with strong business process improvement credentials internationally, Galen brings an interesting, refreshing, and, most importantly, profitable angle to how you will view the brainpower of your employees in the future.  He can be reached at (832) 298-4940 and galenmcp@att.net, and his profile is available on www.linkedin.com.