Fighting the Knowledge Recession

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

Companies who once freely shared information with their customers, suppliers and channel partners are becoming more elusive and closed.  They are locking down knowledge as if it were cash, not sharing nearly as much anymore.  This is hurting them and everyone they do business with pretty quickly.  As a result entire groups of companies risk coming to a grinding halt.

If anything, opening up and sharing even more knowledge, and sharing it aggressively, freely and fluidly is what’s needed. What’s going on today however is a blind focus only on efficiency to the exclusion of anything else.  Efficiency will not save any company from a recession but a strong network of knowledge sharing can help.

Efficiency without relationships is worthless.  Efficiency in the context of relationships is priceless. 

Antidote for the Knowledge Recession

Let’s face it, many of our customers, companies we partner with and even our suppliers have a crisis of confidence going on.  What’s the best path of a lack of confidence?  Knowledge and lots of it. 

All of us can point back in our past and recite those teachers and professors who took an exceptional interest in our success.  They were known for their passion for knowledge and for freely sharing it.  My sixth grade social studies teacher showed how research could unshackle you and take you places you could never go as an 11 year old, yet you could go to the farthest reaches of the globe through research.  There was a statistics professor in college who showed how what many students see as arcane and dry science was actually fascinating and alive with insights just waiting to be discovered when applied to mountains of data.  These teachers were on a mission, and they succeed.


Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher. 
Japanese proverb

While websites, content management or knowledge management systems can’t match the impact these committed teachers had on so many lives, their worth ethic and values need to be the foundation of how your company averts a knowledge recession.  We all need to step up and freely share knowledge to make our customers stronger by making them more informed.  They will be more capable of weathering this economic downturn as a result.

Bottom line: Re-think how you are making your customers, suppliers and partners stronger by sharing knowledge.  From the most simplistic portal to the most sophisticated knowledge management systems, averting a knowledge recession takes a deliberate effort to break down the walls of fear that are starting to freeze companies from working with each other. 

Flickr credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanchome/525890022/sizes/l/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/genewolf/147722422/sizes/m/

Comments

[Louis Columbus]

Jody,

Excellent comment, thank you and thanks for the link to your blog post as well. Ironically since writing this post I have seen a polarization occurring in how consumer companies manage data. Some open up and share to serve, others, like a situation I encountered with a government agency, was marked by the clerk helping me and telling me "Don't tell anyone I made an exception to help you!" The fear mentality that pervades this downturn is bringing knowledge sharing to a grinding halt when knowledge is needed to make relationships work and be productive and profitable for all involved.

[Jody Pellerin]

This shows that companies can behave like individuals. I posted a blog article talking about knowledge sharing between individuals within a business or department. It sounds like a domino effect: one company decides to hang onto their knowledge so other companies become afraid they will lose leverage if they don't copy this behavior.

See:
http://www.phaseware.com/PhaseWare-Files-blog/bid/15903/Yours-Mine-and-Ours-Knowledge-Sharing-Insights-No-2-in-an-ocassional-series-on-KM-and-Social-Media

[Adam]

My two cents...

Note: Value increases with each step to the right.

Data (+structure) > Information (+meaning) > Knowledge (+time) > Wisdom

My goal is to be as Wise a consultant as possible.

[Louis Columbus]

Sam,

So very true, only by opening up the floodgates of knowledge inside a company can it hope to grow and realize its full potential. I've read David Meerman Scott's “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” a few times - it just nails this issue. Mr. Scott's writings continue to underscore how critical it is to be open as a company and freely share information to strengthen customers. I'm looking forward to his next book World Wide Rave too.

His blog http://www.webinknow.com/
is one of the best out there, and his story today of how an author used Twitter to have a character in the book, a dog, communicate, is brilliant.

I really appreciate your comments and your time reading this blog. Thank you!

Louis

[Sam Zipursky]

I couldn't agree with you more on this. This strategy not only makes sense in terms of opening up to your customers and sharing your knowledge, but also in terms of the way people find our organizations and talk about us on the internet these days.

More and more web savvy companies these days understand the value of providing free insightful content, and lots of it. Not do potential customers appreciate all of the free content but search engines like Google love it as well and in return provide you with information hungry eyeballs.

A great book to check out if you guys haven’t already that really helped me change the way I see “sharing knowledge” is the book by David Meerman Scott called “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”. Has anyone here read that and do you agree with me that it really relates to what we’re talking about here?

[Kathy Hrach]

Very true. There is no better way to show that your business is still around and going strong than to keep the communication flowing with customers & partners.

Sharing what you know shows confidence and builds trust - exactly what customers are looking for in a business right now.

Kathy Hrach
Write On Results

[Louis Columbus]

Nigel,

Excellent point, I agree. I get the sense companies are slowing down their efforts to do this, which is in turn just prolonging the downturn. What's needed is a work ethic towards generating knowledge and sharing it versus being purely focused on efficiency alone. Thank you for reading my blog post and commenting on it too.

Cheers,

Louis

[Nigel Legg]

I believe that a major problem is that companies do not know what information they already hold, let alone the problem of sharing with others.
Only when companies convert the information they have into true knowledge, by understanding it's value, can they share it.