Articles

Most executives today recognize that their organizations’ ability to manage knowledge effectively is a strategic imperative. Just how they should go about developing that ability is the challenge. As in most other areas of management advice, there is no shortage of useful frameworks, models and checklists to choose from. Unfortunately, these solutions are generally presented as applicable in any and all situations, and managers are left to make their own mistakes as they use one tool or another to limited effect. Executives can begin to take a more effective approach if they realize that knowledge has a life cycle. Over the course of a five-year study, the authors have devised a model to help explain the life of an idea in commercial settings. The model shows that new knowledge is born as something fairly nebulous and that it takes shape as it is tested, matures through application in a few settings, is diffused to a growing audience and eventually becomes widely understood and recognized as common practice. In this article, the authors develop the concept of the knowledge life cycle in detail and then describe the appropriate strategies for managing ideas at each stage of the cycle.

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The image of the CEO as Alexander the Great has faded; comparisons today are more likely to be made with Charles Ponzi. It may seem like odd timing, then, for an important thinker on corporate leadership and public policy to be issuing a call for CEOs to undertake a serious, committed engagement with a whole range of social, economic and environmental issues & #8212; topics that for years have been at the bottom of most top-executive agendas. But that is precisely what Jeffrey Garten, dean of the Yale School of Management, envisions in his latest book. Garten seeks a new kind of leadership from chief executives, yet one that hearkens back to a period in our history that also required people from all walks of life to come together in the pursuit of common goals.In this interview with SMR senior editor David A. Light, Garten speaks of the need to balance regulation and free markets, the historical precedents for business leadership on public-policy questions, and the urgent need for institutions that can manage the progress of globalization. He also discusses the important first step that CEOs must take before they can exert leadership on a bigger stage: restoring their reputations.

As multinationals unrelentingly seek new growth to satisfy shareholders, they increasingly hear concerns from many quarters about environmental degradation, labor exploitation, cultural hegemony and local autonomy. What is to be done? Must corporations’ thirst for growth and profits serve only to exacerbate the antiglobalization movement? On the contrary, the authors say, a solution to this dilemma does exist. Companies can generate growth and satisfy social and environmental stakeholders through a “great leap” to the base of the economic pyramid, where 4 billion people aspire to join the market economy for the first time. This is not a question simply of doing the right thing in order to lift people out of poverty & #8212; although that will surely be a result of the leap the authors have in mind. From a senior executive’s point of view, it’s a matter of finding the most exciting growth markets of the future. It is also where the technologies that are needed to address the social and environmental challenges associated with economic growth can best be developed. The authors illustrate their point with examples of companies that are already profitably disrupting such industries as telecommunications, consumer electronics and energy production.

As far back as 1959, Peter Drucker insisted on the need to pay more attention to knowledge work and the people doing such work. More than 40 years later, the subject still lacks its Frederick Taylor or Henry Ford; at best, it has been explored by approximations of William Morris and the Italian Futurists & #8212; artists who expressed an understanding of industrial developments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the spirit of the artists concerned with industrialism a century ago, but with an eye toward more scientific advances, the authors spent more than a year investigating the mysteries of knowledge-worker performance. In the process, they realized that organizations can’t begin to increase their understanding of what makes knowledge workers effective until they recognize the importance of such workers as a whole and how to differentiate among them as individuals. In this article, the authors explore five key issues that companies are struggling with and then develop a framework to help organizations think more clearly about how to improve the performance of their knowledge workers.

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