Helping businesses plan exit strategies and pitch for funds: “when I becomes we”

Posted on July 22, 2015 by Paul Corney

Ironically a day after the 144th Open Championship I am at the Surrey Research Park in Guildford helping a group of entrepreneurs practice their pitching though not on the golf course! Its part of the University of Surrey’s Investor Readiness Programme that brings together fledgling business owners seeking early stage funding.

The programme, spread over 3 days and featuring a range of accountants, lawyers, former CEO’s and government officials, is one reason why University of Surrey ranks among the top 3 incubator centres in the UK. I’ve been invited along to make the programme more interactive and will be using facilitation tools and techniques often found in a Knowledge Management Toolkit.

My formal brief for the afternoon on Day One is two fold:

Get the businesses to think about a possible exit strategy
Begin the process of pitiching to investors

My unstated and informal brief:

Create an environment that is conducive to sharing knowledge as a community in the future.

Planning for exit

Few businesses begin life thinking about how they might hand it over and transfer their knowledge. But investors are keen to know what their exit strategy is likely to be and whether it will survive their departure.

Since many embryonic businesses are centred on a bright individual who often holds the key to the Intellectual Property ‘door’ it is essential that good Knowledge & Information governance practices are adopted from Day One so that it can withstand his or her departure.

Simple steps such as cataloguing and storing of formal governance meetings are essential: Due diligence professionals will demand such documentation so better to have assembled it from the get go rather than incur cost later.

I begin by asking this simple question:

Regular readers of my postings will be familiar with this technique (Reverse Brainstorm) and the 6 step process I use to run it:

Get into groups (4 is a good #)
List how to make ‘it’ fail
Go see what others have done
Add what you like to your list
Choose the most important 3
Share in plenary

The aim of this session which I ran with the programme director James Macfarlane was to get the businesses to develop their own checklist and key performance indicators (KPI’s) to measure how they are progressing along their journey.

Here’s one of the team’s workings and below the 6 major issues likely to derail an exit prior to and including the due diligence phase:

Failure to protect their Intellectual Property
Lack of clarity among team over personal and organisation’s exit strategy
Failure to plan for departures and who will succeed
Failure to meet over optimistic targets
Misrepresentation of warranty information
Failure to develop testimonials and reference sites

Testing what others heard

Having recognised the importance of at least thinking about the exit strategy before making a pitch for funds James and I now challenged each business to present their proposition in 90 secconds using these headings. I gave these instructions:

Break into pairs
Take 5 minutes to plan what you are going to say
Give the pitch to your partner
Listen to your partner’s pitch
Back in plenary: make your partner’s pitch to the whole group
In 2 groups discuss what you liked about styles and content
Debrief in plenary and vote for the most compelling proposition

Listening (and watching) well is important to presenting well and the title ‘I heard you to say and understood you to mean’ is a pointer to the need to focus on different ways to tell the story of the business opportunity to different audiences.

We encouraged each presenter to think about how the message they are giving will be interpreted and left them with this metaphor.

Imagine you are writing a press release, this part of your pitch is the headline and the synopsis of the article. The aim is to get questions (in more detail) from interested investors as a result of this (very) brief pitch.

And finally

As always when you work with bright people you learn.

The importance of revenue recognition in the software industry when buying or selling a business – for a good description see: SOP 97-2
The point at which you do a business plan is ‘when I becomes we’
A good strategy should be capable of being represented as a picture
When promoting your business remember to say ‘what it does not how it does it’
People buy you not the numbers and they buy the story you tell: if you can’t say what difference your ‘product’ will make then investors won’t be interested either

Quality, Standards & Risk: emerging KM drivers from Dubai

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Paul Corney

It was great to be back in Dubai last month for KM Middle East 2015 where I was running a Masterclass on Day One and giving the Keynote closing address on Day Two.

When I went there in 1984 the only hotel in Jumeirah was the Chicago Beach Hotel and that was an isolated spot some 30 minutes drive from Deira on empty roads and across desert. You went there for a bit of R & R after a tour of duty in Saudi Arabia.

Today the emirate is home to hundreds of thousands of expats and foreign workers all of whom are bringing knowledge to help Dubai develop into one the world’s premier tourist destinations. Here’s how the same piece of coastline looks 30 years on and you can get there today via a metro system!

Few in 1984 predicted Dubai would grow to be such a diversified economy: limited dependency on oil, increasingly reliant on the knowledge and competencies of its expanding (predominantly foreign) workforce and having the world’s busiest airport.

The underpinnings of such progress are people, process (and of course) technology. The disparity in numbers of indigenous Emirati to Expatriates (who are transient by nature) means that there is greater relience on process and technology to ensure continuity. It is no surprise that the Knowledge Management activity in the region should be more of an operational/tactical nature rather than strategic. This was evident for me at KM Mid East.

The Event – Day One

Held over two days at the very luxurious Park Hyatt Dubai the event comprised a series of workshops on Day One and a Plenary Conference on Day Two. My workshop Unlocking the true value of Knowledge Management: identifying and assessing your organisation’s Knowledge Assets took place in the afternoon from 2pm-6pm.

There were 20 people, a nice mix of gender, age and experience. This was the agenda for the afternoon:

My aim was to get the participants to think about why KM mattered and to begin to develop an understanding of the Knowledge Assets they had in their business.

I was also keen to look at a few different ways to identify and assess their value and what might they then do to mitigate potential loss.

Team A at KMME Workshop displaying their ccompleted Analyser.

Session 6 An exercise in mapping was particularly revealing.

Focusing on a recent decision ‘Team A’ used the Event Analyser to describe how they had saved a substantial amount by drawing on the internal knowledge of their organisation which they were then able to pass on for others to use.

It was an enjoyable afternoon (the opening Ice Breaker helped to

Everyone got involved

lower barriers) and I made sure each session had a mix of informing and doing with plenty of interaction, stories (and humour). And we finished at 6pm with a full contingent!

The Event – Day Two

John Girard and Dave Snowden in the foreground

The slide deck has been made available for each presentation by the organisers and can be found here. There was also a twitter feed #kmme with a few interesting comments thrown in as the day proceeded.

The event was well attended and the presentations informative. Being at the end of the day I had the opportunity to hear everyone. My attention was stimulated by some of the local presentations especially since so many focused on measurement and frameworks.

EFQM Model adopted in Dubai

One which caught my eye which was how Quality Standards such as EFQM are becoming the drivers and measurement yardsticks for KM implementations.

This adherence to standards of excellence fits with the way Dubai and the UAE are measuring progress across a wide spectrum of activities. It was even evident in the surplus food discussions I had while I was there.

Cascading the EFQM model – KM Business Results

People understand that to win environmental and sustainability awards you have to be able to demonstrate effective reuse so the measure is based on sustainability and environmental impact not on the social impact.

Here’s just one of the slides by way of an example of how the framework is being cascaded down in KM.

While entirely logical It poses a number questions for me:

are the evaluators experenced KM Practitioners?
the start point would seem to be critical – yes an organisation might make great progress but where is the benchmarking element?
where do the frameworks cater for increasing the value of an organisation’s Knowledge Assets?
is there a danger of being in love with the process rather than the results of the process?

It’s a great start though and similar to work done in Singapore where EFQM and ASQ measures have been combined in some organisations as a way of cascading down operating values and standards (SOP’s). Where organisations start to make progress is when competencies are built into the framework.

My Takeaways

So apart from a number of very interesting discussions with the other speakers over dinner and with the delegates at the event what else did I takeaway?

KM is increasingly being driven by issues of Quality, Standards & Risk. These are operationally focused but provide tangible measures that organisations can point to as a way of demonstrating value. EFQM is the predominent standard in UAE and KM programmes need to align with it.
Standards organisations are introducing criteria that include being able to demonstrate technical competence in KM including the provision of a KM strategy. If you want the award (and often you need it to sell what you produce) then KM is a must do.*
Risk (of individual and collective Knowledge loss) in a society that is still essentially transient places great importance on ‘knowing what we know’ and so Knowledge Assets Audting (identifying and assessing) is likely to grow in importance.

The final takeaway: my speaker ‘award’ (presented by John Girard along with the Deputy Director, Dubai Chambers of Commerce)

* as a footnote to this I came across this:

The Standards Institution of Israel (SII), Israel’s member body to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), has submitted a proposal for a new international standard focusing on requirements for knowledge management systems. As the U.S. member body to ISO, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) invites all interested stakeholders to submit comments on the proposal by Friday, February 14, 2014.

The proposed International Standard would set down requirements for organizational knowledge management systems, including the creation and maintenance of such systems, the nurturing of a knowledge management culture, measurement of organizations’ knowledge, and approaches to sharing knowledge management solutions. The standard would cover businesses, nonprofits, government organizations, and other groups of any size and in any field.

“What’s in it for me”: sharing client knowledge in a workplace with 4 generations.

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Paul Corney

On March 2nd I was in Broadgate talking to the Chairman and two Managing Partners of a law firm. There, at the invitation of the Chief Operating Officer, we were discussing inter alia how to deepen relationships so that when the senior relationship manager departs, their knowledge, networks and clients don’t depart with them.

‘Why would I change, there’s nothing in it for me’

Against a backdrop of increased M&A activity and potential ‘Lift Outs’ (hiring of teams from another firm) we talked about why millionaires would share what they know for the benefit of the rest of the firm. I recalled an incident from a previous client, a federation of 13 businesses with very wealthy MD’s who had no intention of passing on what they knew about clients or cross selling for the good of the whole firm. This is what one MD said:

I wouldn’t let …. anywhere near my client; for a start my business is unique and I don’t want them ruining a relationship which has been built up over many years. Ours is a relationship business and I have an assistant who knows everything about the client and we store all information on the …. system.

And this from a senior banker:

I have a flat in London and a house in Umbria. I drive an Aston and the school fees are all paid. Why would I want to change?

These are not untypical responses from the upper echelons of organisations.

‘I have no assets so I go where the excitement is’

Contrast that with these factional ‘Generation Rent’ (People born in the 1980s who have no hope of getting on the property ladder, a term coined by The Independent’s Tim Walker) examples arising our of conversations I had a few days ago.

‘Sam‘ is 30. He left college and became a talented electrical engineer. As part of the BT’s acquistion of EE he now finds himself in demand. His prospective boss (a newly promoted middle manager) sends him an email in which he tells him how lucky Sam will be to work on his new team – I kid you not! So Sam retorts, ‘actually I am not going to work for you or on your team…’

Sam lives with his girlfriend, they are able to afford to rent but have little immediate prospect of owning a home. She is training to become a teacher. Their horizons are near term and they want to work for people who share their values where they can move on when the role (or people they work with) becomes uninteresting.

Sam’s father Matt who is in his late 40’s had a mortgage at 21 fuelled by the belief that home ownership was the ultimate benchmark of a civilised society. Sam doesn’t feel the same, for him experience is more important.

‘Micha‘ is 23 and has been in work for 2 years since graduating from Univeristy of Southampton. She doesn’t know if she can afford to leave her parents to move in with her boyfriend. Her world is governed by whether she can service her credit card and overdraft and of getting away from a 45 year old middle manager who has read the corporate values manual but disregarded it from day one in his pursuit of a plethora of consumer durables. He speaks the talk but doesn’t walk it.

Generation Rent employees have a very different set of values and aspirations from their colleagues. Unable (or unwilling) to join the property owning fraternity they are more transient than their predecessers and do not have the same sense of attachment. They will go where the action is unencumbered by physical assets.

They come to firms with a developed sense of online community but are less adroit at human interactions. Engaging with these organisational foot soldiers is going to be one of the biggest challenges facing senior management over the next few years as they try to make organisations leaner and more productive. And no longer I fear can Senior Managers subcontract the task to HR, Learning, Training or indeed Knowledge Management or rely on the cascading methods of communication that have been prevelant in most organisations seeking to get changes made and messages understood.

crossing a broad chasm

The proportion of people classed as Generation Rent is predicted to expand as UK home ownership becomes a distant horizon. This gap isn’t going to close quickly so organisations are relying on squeezed middle management to be the water carriers between the top and the bottom. For the first time ever we have 4 generations of workers all working at the same time!

In the current edition of ‘The World Today’ Chatham House’s bimonthly magazine there is piece on a recent members event during which Kevin Sutcliffe, Head of News Programming EU, Vice News had this to say:

There is a notion that television news and documentaries attract an older audience. The logic in editorial meetings at Channel 4 News and the BBC is that people aged 18-35 aren’t interested in the world. VICE started to put out documentaries about the coup in Mali or the way Egypt and the Arab Spring was unfolding. They were very popular. They had engagement times of about 25 mnutes and they were getting hundreds of thousands of views. So there is great interest from that group in the world. The issue was the way it was being presented. Most television talks down to people, and that is not representative of 16-35 year olds.

I found this encouraging and supports a comment from Gordon Vala-Webb who Sandra Higgison interviewed a few years back when my colleagues and I at Sparknow were conducting research into the Evolvng Role of the Knowledge Manager. In response to a question that indirectly asked how his KM initiative at PWC Canada impacted all ages and levels of seniority Gordon said:

Our biggest portal users have been here less than six months

What is striking about all of these examples is the expectation and motivational gap between those at the top and those lower down the organisation which prompts this question: Is a fundamental shift needed in the so called Social Contract between employees and firms to bridge this chasm and make organisations more sustainable?

How to close the gap

Create a Corporate Social Contract (with embedded KM aspirations)

In a recent piece of work engaging with a brand new Senior Management Team I encouraged them to get their personal values and beliefs on the table and craft their own commitment to each other and the team. It mirrors this piece extracted from Harvard Business Review For Great Teamwork, Start with a Social Contract https://hbr.org/2012/04/to-ensure-great-teamwork-start

To turn groups of employees into great teams, a powerful first step is to form a social contract — an explicit agreement that lays out the ground rules for team members’ behaviors. A contract can cover territory such as how members will work together, make decisions, communicate, share information, and support each other. Social contracts clearly outline norms for how members will and should interact with one another.

Team norms exist whether openly stated or not. A good leader should facilitate sessions with his/her team to uncover the existing norms, both positive and negative, that impact team functioning. Establishing a social contract can reinforce positive behaviors while helping teams to overcome dysfunctional ones.

I’d add one aspect here: the development of Knowledge Competencies (at a personal and corporate level) should be a thread that runs through this document.

Contemplate disintintermediatimg middle management

This will be heresy in some quarters but I generally believe we are at a tipping point when it comes to how organisations are working. The interpretation of messages from the top and flow of ideas to the top while often seen as an important filtering process seems to me more likely to alienate Generation Rent employees who are used to collaborative not command and control environments. Dialogue has to be more transparant not more opaque. Social media is exacerbating the naming and shaming of bad organisations who are often characterised by a broadcast rather than collaborative approach to internal and external communications.

Go 3 Levels down for an effective client relationship

When I set up a client strategy process at an investement bank the first challenge was how to widen and deepen relationships with our major fee earning clients so that we could accomodate the departure of a key Relationship Director. We only considered a relationship ‘secure’ when there were three contacts at three levels across our and their organisation. We documented what we knew and kept it current with regular contacts at all levels.

However, then, as now, successful ‘rain makers’ could demand want they want; a case of a slightly skewed symbiotic relationship, wherein Senior Management pay lip service to values statements and Corporate Social Contracts while bowing to commercial reality? The process worked primarily as I reported to the General Manager and CEO and carried ‘the pen’ with a mandate for change and the ultimate sanction of appointing a different Relationship Director if another refused to participate.

In another meeting last week in The City I was with the KIM Head of a large global law firm overseeing the process of deepening relationships with clients. He recognised the need for a meaningful client relationship to be 3 level deep and the importance of illustrating the differences in the way we all see the same event or object. His company is getting clients in at 3 levels for show and tell and share sessions as a way of cementing a relationship and getting expectations and aspirations out on the table.

Focus on Risk and Assets as a framework when thinking about what Critical Knowledge to keep

What struck a chord during last week’s meetings was the notion of risk – most organisations understand risk but few set about managing Knowledge in that context or seeing Knowledge as an asset. While a lot of work has been done on the Risk of Knowledge loss less has been done on the value of Knowledge Assets.

Following a conversation between John Wade (Gill Jennings & Every) and Paul J Corney

This is how one organisation is starting to think about how to contextualise the capture and retention of its Critical Knowledge. This statemant (also from HBR – Managing your MIssion Critical Knowledge – January 2015) sums it up well:

Few companies think explicitly about what knowledge they possess, which parts of it are key to future success, how critical knowledge assets should be managed, and which spheres of knowledge can usefully be combined

Its a topic I will be picking up over the next couple of weeks at KM Middle East in Dubai where I am making a speech on Why effective knowledge capture and retention matters then running a workshop on Unlocking the true value of Knowledge Management: identifying and assessing your organisation’s Knowledge Assets and then Singapore where I will be running Masterclasses.

Out of austerity, growth of Social and a dose of Logical Minds: insights from working in Lisboa

Posted on November 4, 2014 by Paul Corney

Real Club Tauromáquico Português, Lisboa

I’ve just spent an inspiring couple of days in Lisboa. It started well: a wonderfully productive 3 hours in the company of Ana Neves of Knowman discussing SocialNow 2015 in Amsterdam, followed by a reunion dinner at the Real Club Tauromáquico Português, (Royal Bullfighting Club of Portugal) Lisboa with a former colleague I had not seen since 1986.

The prime motivation for my visit (apart from the 25c temperature) was providing advice to a business that helps children with learning difficulties as it thinks through its future options.

economic & business backdrop

Over dinner, my former colleague, an influential banker whose ancestor discovered an island in the Atlantic now named after him, shared his perceptions of the current state of play. Here’s my take on what he said:

…the government is doing very well but the current political structure means decisions are taken very slowly. I am an optimist by nature and see great potential in our people but our media is always looking for mistakes and bad news and never tells us about areas we are doing well.

Taken at face value this gives grounds for optimism and yet in previous conversations I discovered that the Portuguese prefer to hear ‘experts’ from overseas rather than trust their own and go overseas to make their fortunes. So for young entrepreneurs the future is bleak.

Yet Portugal is a country that ranks 25th in the World Bank’s ease of doing business ranking (ahead of Netherlands, France and Spain).

Click to enlarge picture

It’s improving standing is due to a raft of measures many of which are currently subject to scrutiny and debate in parliament:

Portugal lowered its corporate income tax rate from 25-23% and introduced a reduced corporate tax rate for a portion of the taxable profits of qualifying small and medium-size enterprises.
Portugal made enforcing contracts easier by adopting a new code of civil pro-

cedure designed to reduce court backlog, streamline court procedures, enhance

the role of judges and speed up the resolution of standard civil and commer-

cial disputes.

Since 2008 the government has made a number of changes to employment law. While these have resulted in increased productivity there is growing disenchantment at declining living standards and the young expect to leave when they graduate.

What does the immediate future hold? Increased personal taxes, an increased disparity between those able to ride the continued wave of austerity and those who can’t and a desperate need for investment for young start up businesses.

Initiatives such as Cidadania, an event aimed at stimulating discussion in society around the use of new forms of communication, will help. This year’s event in Porto showcased numerous examples of how empowered citizens have interacted with NGO’s, Government and Public Administrations. Ana Neves has also been running a Community of Practice for COTEC and written a guide on helping its member organisations to choose KM Tools. Ana would be the first to admit that Portuguese organisations are not yet big on Knowledge Sharing or Knowledge Management and that community involvement in social tools is in its infancy. But interest is growing!

LogicaMentes (Logical Minds)

Autism strikes without consideration of ethnicity, gender or financial background. It is a developmental disorder that affects the way people interact with the world and other people.

Each child or adult with autism is unique and, so, each autism intervention plan should be tailored to address specific needs.

The UK’s NHS notes:

Some types of intervention can involve hours of intensive work, and this is not always possible for many families because of the practical, emotional and financial commitments necessary.

Treatment is based on the assessment of the physician carrying out the examination and frequent case assessments with the team thereafter. Treatments now take place in the home, at school and at clinics like LogicaMentes.

Much is written and there are countless online sites providing guidance, advice and online collaboration to parents who often find this a very difficult condition to live with.

There are a variety of treatment methodologies, LogicaMentes bases its on the book written by the clinic’s co-founder, Claudia Bandeira De Lima.

They also use a wonderful iPad application developed by a member of their team that enhances the learning experience for children. Already it has paid off: the app has facilitated communication between a mother and son where previously his condition has precluded any. Small but significant steps!

Resource management, records management and cash management are core competences as are the ability to share knowledge among the team and manage a diverse group of stakeholders (parents, schools, doctors).

It is a priviledge to have been invited to help the team and to be working in Portugal.

‘…there’s zero collaboration or institutional knowledge’: learning lessons from winning teams

Posted on October 24, 2014 by Paul Corney

So says Paul Azinger, the last US Captain to win the Ryder Cup, in the aftermath of the 2014 event and the accompanying soul searching. He implicitly acknowledges the importance of building on what ‘you’ know as an institution if you are to be successful. This is what he said:

A big difference between us and them is that Europe always has a succession plan. McGinley was surrounded by past captains and future captains, and they all reap the benefits. We’re lone rangers as far as captains go. Nobody knows what we’ve done in the past. There’s zero collaboration or institutional knowledge.

why Team Europe’s victory is relevant to business

Why is the outcome of a biennial golf match of interest to lawyers and others who work in highly rewarded and individualistic roles? Because the players are all ‘Rock Stars’ in their own right who come together sporadically to play (and win) against their peer group.

What stands out about the European approach? Meticulous planning, attention to detail, clarity over roles before, during and after each Ryder Cup match and a willingness to acknowledge that no one player is bigger than the team. Business is no different relying on a collaborative team approach and a set of shared values.

In October 2012 Apple CEO Tim Cook reshuffled his team, this is how it was reported in a Bloomberg Business Week interview:

“The key in the change that you’re referencing is my deep belief that collaboration in essential for innovation – and I didn’t just start believing that. I’ve always believed that,” said Cook. “It’s always been a core belief at Apple. Steve very deeply believed in this.”

Cook said that he wanted to ensure that Apple takes its already “enormous” level of collaboration even higher. “There are many things. But the one thing we do, which I think no one else does, is integrate hardware, software, and services in such a way that most consumers begin to not differentiate anymore.”

“You have to be an A-plus at collaboration,” Cook continued. “And so the changes that we made get us to a whole new level of collaboration.”

Here’s how commentator Kristine Kern (@kristinekern) of the Table Group saw this move:

Let’s be clear: Ousting a rock star from your team — or asking them to change their ways — is not always something you can do. But it’s something you should consider. “Like most things, it’s not black and white,” Kern concludes. “Organizational health requires rock stars do both stellar and healthy work. Which shouldn’t be a problem: Most true rock stars rise to a challenge. Just don’t be afraid to demand it.”

why shared values matter

Some time ago I was the Business & Strategy Advisor to an Anglo-Dutch company in the professional services / software business. It was around the dotcom boom period when investors were falling over themselves to back the next hot opportunity. Company valuations were bizarre: at one point on revenues of $20m we had a market cap that was 40 times bigger. Our AIM share price went from £1.25 to £16+. It was easy to be profligate, we weren’t and I take personal pride in having taken the lead on travel budgets and integrating the acquisitions we made.

As we grew (acquiring first a US firm, then a German one) and shifted our centre of operations (and development) from Europe to the USA the Executive Management team all recognized the importance of having a set of values and a structure that could transcend global operations while recognizing cultural nuances peculiar to the location of each office.

What might go down well as a motivational incentive in Denver would need tweaking to be embraced in Maastricht let alone in Guildford. We needed a framing device that everyone in the business could buy into and in the management’s case the cojones to ‘get with the programme’. So we organised a cross company group of all levels to work through what they wanted out of the business – how they wanted to be treated as employees and in most cases, shareholders.

To this day I can remember the constituent parts:

a clear vision understood by all
a meritocracy that rewarded success and took action on poor performance
inspiring and visible leadership
a place that was fun to work where you could pick up the phone to anyone.

We had 6 locations and office sizes ranged from 12-50. We had a central sales/CRM system everyone used and we had quarterly conference calls with the management team where people could ask what they wanted. Board meetings rotated around the various offices, one was virtual the next in situ. When tough decisions were required we were clear about why they were being taken and communicated that.

Of course technology and process played a role, the corporate intranet was a good information source. We conducted Peer Assists, After Action Reviews; we fed our learnings back into the development process and we used what we learned to reengineer the business around the Stage-Gate New Product Development Process.

The going got tough, people got let go, yet Sopheon survived and today has an award winning software, Accolade, with embedded Knowledge deployed in the innovation and new product departments across hundreds of organisations globally.

so what

Whether business or sport, people respond to good leaders who provide guidance and clarity, hold people to account for poor performance and recognize/reward exceptional performance. They are also good at making the right decision and leading teams through implementation by inspiration, perspiration and collaboration. I’m sure those will feature prominently when Captain McGinley releases the inevitable ‘Building a winning Ryder Cup Team’, book.

Good decisions are informed by good knowledge: of clients, of markets and of resources. Knowledge Management when performed well becomes ingrained behaviour and Knowledge Sharing is a core element.

and finally

I am indebted to Euan Semple (who talks and writes common sense) for my summary. Taken from his excellent tome ‘Organisations Don’t Tweet, People Do‘ Euan argues that in today’s interconnected world it is increasingly important to be seen to add value and to be seen to be knowledgeable and willing to share that knowledge. He goes further:

In the old days ‘knowledge is power’ used to mean holding on to it and only giving it out judiciously to certain people. In an Internet world there is no point in having knowledge if people don’t know you have it, and if you are not prepared to share it. Web tools enable more knowledge to flow more readily around your organisation. Taking part in this process is going to be more obviously a part of being more productive than ever before. Being able and willing to share your knowledge will become a key business skill.

Collaboration is the mechanism by which Knowledge is often shared. It is something Apple and the US Ryder Cup designate (a forecast from me – Azinger to be the US Captain in 2016) recognise as being a core ingredient for a successful venture. So should you!

knowledge et al

when the journey is as important as the destination

Category Archives: Business Issues (Strategic)