The "Yellow-Brick" Road to KM

by Bethann Ashfield, New York Stock Exchange

Question:

What do shamrocks, symphony orchestras, gazelles, federations,

astronauts, atoms and molecules, school of sharks, virtual networks, white water rafting, jazz bands, diamonds, and ant colonies have in common?

Answer:

"Not much. But all of them have been invoked to describe the properties of a new organizational model that is replacing top-down bureaucratic machines," said Roseabeth Moss Kanter in On the Frontiers of Management.

What this Harvard Business School Professor has written sums up what my "StarShip Enterprise" is all about. We are ensemble players, working under the "baton of a world renowned brand." We're a community or beehive at work or play.

You may be asking what the theme of this column is? It's about what radically changed my attitude, as well as my ability to explore what's insidelike exploring the ocean rather than blasting off into outer space. It's a necessary, vital part of truly being alive! We've done it on the NYSE trading floor. The specialists' books are open. The floor's completely transparent and there is nothing to hide.

It is sharing.

I learned the mantra "share and share alike" at KCI (Knowledge Champion Institute).

KCI is not some brick and mortar building. It's a "state of mind." It is a very well orchestrated, flexible group of individuals pulled together to serve a purpose.

"Knowledge Management" is a critical part of doing business in today's economy. It is a term used to differentiate left-brain or concrete knowledge from right-brain or intuitive knowledge. KM is "the harnessing and organization of information assets that reside in the databases of a company or in its employees' collective brainpower." It has become such a critical part of doing business in today's economy that my StarShip must have it.

KCI asks its participants to "sign" a contract with their chosen mentor. My mentor happens to be my boss and partner. He pioneered the stock exchange's intranet initiative, and is now set to explore this discipline in order to capture whatever I get for his "tech silo." But KM is shared, not compiled. The intranet is the vehicle that conveys the knowledge map, but the central processing unit of KM is the caliber of the brainpower in your individual enterprise. It's the minds that mine the data.

SLA's managing director of Strategic Learning and Development, Jeff

De Cagna (a.k.a., the "Learning Guy"), is so gung ho about teaching KM that he set up a three-and-a-half day symposium about it this past April at the Hyatt Regency in Crystal City, Va. The symposium's panel

focused on Dr. Nancy Dixon's textbook, Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know. The book outlines five "serial knowledge transfers" embraced by five separate enterprises.

Seth Weaver Kahan, senior information officer of The World Bank, which was first to implement KM, used his storytelling skills to lead off the symposium. Storytelling is a critical part of KM and Seth set the stage for journey by passing around a "talking stick" (I immediately recognized the "Shaman" in him and recalled Joe Campbell's lectures on these mystic healers] so that each of us could discuss our journey to Crystal City and, in so doing so, find out where we had come from and why we were there.

The KM panel included Dixon, Kahan, Ann Noles, knowledge champion of Capital One, and Cheryl Lamb, manager of the Knowledge Resource Center at Buckman Laboratories International. De Cagna led the discussion groups for the entire symposium. As our mornings, afternoons, and evenings blended together, I got the sense that we were becoming one family.

Each of our days together gave us a clearer understanding of what our individual enterprises sought, where each stood in relation to the other, and how the knowledge of the serial transfers Dixon conveyed in her book could be used and repackaged to suit the unique enterprises we represented. We listened to what the panelists shared with us and digested it through a series of improvisational exercises. When we gathered together on our last morning there, we told each other what we would say to our enterprises when we returned home.

It's amazing what I thought I knew about my own enterprise, but once I participated in the exercises and shared my knowledge with the others at the symposium, my knowledge had evolved.

We all came to the realization that our journeys had barely begun. Now, we're learning and reading the literature about KM. The short journey to Crystal City was merely the stepping-stone onto the "Yellow-Brick Road" of KM.