This case is about how the World Bank, after determining that the creation and dissemination of knowledge to the international development community was one of their strategic roles and objectives, transitioned from being just a lending bank to both a lending and "knowledge bank." The challenges and issues addressed in this case are focused around both general change management issues (aligning the organization around a totally different set of goals and priorities) and specific knowledge management challenges (incentives to share knowledge; institutionalizing KM in the daily roles and activities of employees; defining metrics to measure success and impact). This is a follow-up, "part 2" to an earlier case published by the Harvard Kennedy School (case number 1936.0, "Knowledge Management at the World Bank"), which focused on the thirteen-year period that the Bank management internally promoted the idea that the Bank needed to become the leading creator, broker and sharer of knowledge about international development. As a result of this thirteen-year effort, by 2009 there was a fair amount of acceptance and support within the Bank for the new knowledge management objectives, and this case is more focused on how the Bank approached achieving their knowledge management-related goals and overcoming the associated internal transformational challenges. Case number 2012.0.
Can large companies be both innovative and efficient? Yes, argue Adler, of the University of Southern California; Heckscher, of Rutgers; and Prusak, an independent consultant. But they must develop new organizational capabilities that will create the atmosphere of trust that knowledge work requires-and the coordinating mechanisms to make it scalable. Specifically, such organizations must learn to: Define a shared purpose that guides what people at all levels of the organization are trying to achieve together; Cultivate an ethic of contribution in which the highest value is accorded to people who look beyond their specific roles and advance the common purpose; Develop scalable procedures for coordinating people's efforts so that process-management activities become truly interdependent; and Create an infrastructure in which individuals' spheres of influence overlap and collaboration is both valued and rewarded. These four goals may sound idealized, but the imperative to achieve them is practical, say the authors. Only the truly collaborative enterprises that can tap into everyone's ideas-in an organized way-will compete imaginatively, quickly, and cost-effectively enough to become the household names of this century.
This case traces the history and evolution of Knowledge Management at the World Bank. While primarily a financial institution offering customized loans and grants across a wide range of sectors in some 100 countries, the World Bank has increasingly become involved in developing, storing, and transferring knowledge requested by its clients for project and other development. Currently there is a growing interest and demand for the sharing of Bank knowledge and its more formal knowledge-based advisory services. Many of the more advanced middle-income countries have graduated from the Bank's development assistance programs, but still want to have access to the Bank's knowledge capital, whether this is in the form of cross-country evidence, informal policy notes, or specialized advisory services. In this case, it is against this background that the Bank and its shareholders are grappling with the question of how best to combine and leverage its knowledge capabilities along with its financial resources. HKS Case Number 1936.0
Future investments in knowledge management should focus less on enhancing systems that track down information and more on helping employees use what they've found.
This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Getting more value from knowledge--especially from a firm's own hard-won knowledge--is one of the central challenges facing companies today. Many organizations have approached this problem in recent years by making big investments in IT systems, but the payoff has often been disappointing. Companies would do better to emulate the innovative giants of the Internet--Google, eBay, and Amazon--whose success has in part derived from their ability to make it easy for customers to find what they are looking for, to browse for products and services, and to evaluate potential purchases. These are exactly the things that are hard to do in most companies. That is, employees find that it is not intuitive to search for information in company repositories; they cannot easily browse within categories of knowledge; and they are not given the context they need to evaluate the quality of the knowledge they do find. The authors assert that if organizations apply the basic, proven approaches of the Internet success stories to capture the attention of their employees, they should be able to improve their ROI on sunk IT costs while increasing knowledge-worker productivity.
Two hundred of today's leading management thinkers were asked to identify their gurus. The result is an illuminating list, notable for some of the less obvious names it contains.
There's an unsung hero in your organization. It's the person who's bringing in new ideas from the outside about how to manage better. This is the manager who, for instance, first uttered the phrase "Balanced Scorecard" in your hallways, or "real options," or "intellectual capital." Managerial innovation is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage--especially given the speed with which product innovations are copied--but it doesn't happen automatically. It takes a certain kind of person to welcome new management ideas and usher them into an organization. The authors recently studied 100 such people to find out how they translate new ideas into action in their organizations. "Idea practitioners," as the authors call them, begin by scouting for ideas. All of them are avid readers of management literature and enthusiastic participants in business conferences; many are friendly with business gurus. Once they've identified an idea that seems to hold promise, they tailor it to fit their organizations' specific needs. Next, they actively sell the idea--to senior executives, to the rank and file, to middle managers. And finally, they get the ball rolling by participating in small-scale experiments. But when those take off, they get out of the way and let others execute. In this article, the authors identify the characteristics of idea practitioners and offer strategies for managing them wisely.
Managers invariably use their personal contacts when they need to, say, meet an impossible deadline or learn the truth about a new boss. Increasingly, it's through these informal networks--not just through traditional organizational hierarchies--that information is found and work gets done. But to many senior executives, informal networks are unobservable and ungovernable--and, therefore, not amenable to the tools of management. As a result, executives tend to work around informal networks or, worse, try to ignore them. When they do acknowledge the networks' existence, executives fall back on intuition--scarcely a dependable tool--to guide them in nurturing this social capital. It doesn't have to be that way. It is entirely possible to develop and manage informal networks systematically, say management experts Cross and Prusak. Specifically, senior executives need to focus their attention on four key role-players in informal networks: Central connectors link most employees in an informal network with one another; they provide the critical information or expertise that the entire network draws on to get work done. Boundary spanners connect an informal network with other parts of the company or with similar networks in other organizations. Information brokers link different subgroups in an informal network; if they didn't, the network would splinter into smaller, less effective segments. And finally, there are peripheral specialists, who anyone in an informal network can turn to for specialized expertise but who work apart from most people in the network. The authors describe the four roles in detail, discuss the use of a well-established tool called social network analysis for determining who these role-players are in the network, and suggest ways that executives can transform ineffective informal networks into productive ones.
Business runs better when people within a company have close ties and trust one another. But the relationships that make organizations work effectively are under assault for several reasons. Building such "social capital" is difficult in volatile times. Disruptive technologies spawn new markets daily, and organizations respond with constantly changing structures. The problem is worsened by employees' working off-site or on their own. The authors describe how managers can help their organizations thrive by making effective investments in social capital. For instance, companies that value social capital demonstrate a commitment to retention as a way of limiting workplace volatility. The authors cite SAS's extensive efforts to signal to employees that it sees them as human beings, not just workers. Managers can foster cooperation by giving employees a common sense of purpose through good strategic communication and inspirational leadership. Johnson & Johnson's well-known credo, which says the company's first responsibility is to the people who use its products, has helped the company in times of adversity, as in 1982 when cyanide in Tylenol capsules killed seven people. Other methods of fostering cooperation include rewarding the behavior with cash and establishing rules that get people into the habit of cooperating.
This article draws attention to a number of errors that could potentially cripple the efforts of any organization attempting to generate and leverage knowledge. Many of these errors are associated with the concept of knowledge itself--how knowledge is understood in organizational settings. The article notes the sources of each error as well as some key implications for managing knowledge. It concludes with some brief suggestions on how to avoid, or at least ameliorate these errors.