No, no, no. I wasn’t talking about Social Security and credit card numbers. It’s all the stuff companies claim is uniquely valuable, that has never occurred to competitors, and that would never occur to them unless and until someone sent them a PowerPoint deck.
Last week’s KJR made the case that most businesses have become so permeable that it’s a fact, not a problem, which means they have to deal with it, not solve it.
And further, that the best way to deal with permeability is to take advantage of it as a better path to profitability than trying to build ever-higher and thicker walls around the enterprise.
As all software testers know, good test plans include a plentiful portion of edge cases, so it isn’t surprising some correspondents expressed concern that KJR might take the position that corporations should relax their controls on information whose compromise could result in, for example, identity theft.
These edge cases are good tests, only not of the overall principle. Customer identification and privacy information? Protect it to the best of your ability. Short-term plans where whoever gets to market first wins big? Protect those to the best of your ability, too.
The process you use for purchase-order/invoice reconciliation, or, as Jimmy John’s notoriously seems to think needs protecting, for making a ham and cheese sandwich?
Uh … no.
As pointed out last week, many business theorists and leaders, for several decades now, have considered employees to be fungible commodities, to be traded into and out of the pool of available talent without compunction or regret.
But when they’re traded, they take their knowledge with them — an apparently unintended consequence of this employment philosophy.
Shared knowledge is at the heart of the Cognitive Enterprise. One consequence of replacing a long-term employee who has a vast fund of institutional knowledge is …
Well, it depends. If the employee’s replacement is quite a lot less experienced, or if there is no replacement, the enterprise’s total shared-knowledge account will have been diminished.
If, on the other hand, the business replaces the departing employee with one who has just as large a fund of institutional knowledge, or larger, only it’s a fund accumulated in different institutions, then the enterprise’s shared-knowledge account will increase.
It’s permeability in action, even without any electronic knowledge sharing. Imagine the company chart of accounts had a way to track shared knowledge. Think its executives might make different staffing decisions?
It would be an intriguing exercise in finance, figuring out how to tote up all of the valuable knowledge held in an organization. The trickiest part wouldn’t be how to put a number on it. Not that this would be easy, understand, but given how many non-disclosure agreements claim that revealing any of it would cause irreparable harm, you’d think someone would know how big a number “irreparable” is, at least approximately.
Not to keep you in suspense, here’s what would be the trickiest part: In a cognitive enterprise, knowledge is widely shared — it’s what the whole organization knows that counts, not just what an individual who works there knows.
Which gets to one of my own trade secrets, which I’m allowed to share with you because it was knowledge I had that preceded my joining Dell Services: No matter what the challenge or issue, there are employees who know all about it and what to do about it. Their problem, and one of my best ways of earning my keep as a consultant, is that until my team and I show up, nobody has any interest in what they have to say.
To be fair, after my teams and I show up and do listen to them, putting it all together into a nice, coherent narrative and plan, very often client leadership doesn’t want to hear it from us, either. It is, I guess, cognition prevention at the highest levels of leadership.
This is also why embracing permeability is a safe knowledge management tactic: If your company’s stuff makes it into, for example, a LinkedIn discussion forum where the employees of other companies read all about it, you have little to worry about.
The odds are long nobody will listen to them after your employees have made them smarter. If you’re smart, you won’t duplicate that mistake.
So stop trying to protect your own IP and learn from all those other folks who are sharing theirs.
Once more thing. If you think this week’s KJR is worth sharing, please do so. Just make sure to respect the copyright notice at the bottom when you do.
You speak of “permeability” or “share knowledge”. Tsk, tsk, tsk. You would think one in your position would know the proper term is “tribal knowledge”. This has been around for the many decades I’ve worked in IT. “Go see Sally: she put all that stuff together and knows how it works.” Or “Ask Tom: he’s been around forever and knows how stuff works around here.”
This “tribal knowledge” thought has even made its way into workplace humor. The old joke about a machine stops, the business can’t function, nobody knows how to fix it. They call in a retired engineer. He puts an X on machine, hits it with a hammer, and it hums back into life. He bills the company $10K for his services. They ask for details. He updates the invoice with:
– Chalk: $1
– Knowing where to put the X: $9,999
Tribal knowledge at its finest.
Not the same thing, actually. Tribal knowledge is a form of widespread knowledge-sharing inside the corporation (but far from the only form). But permeability is a matter of extending and embracing knowledge-sharing throughout a community of interest that extends far beyond the walls of the corporation.
Make sense?
As for the copyright.
1) You have it in your email but do not have it on the permalink. So just what are you trying to copyright?
2) A copyright of your ideas would be not in line of permeability and thus should not be encouraged. In any case I am rarely in favor of copyrights or patents on “mere” ideas. Implementation is another matter and you are trying to copyright your exact words so that you get proper attribution for them then this is good.
Copyright isn’t hypocritical. You put effort into your work, and deserve credit for it. I’d hate to see the Nobel committee give credit for my (your) work to somebody else.
Besides, asking that people five attribution will build subscribers and enable you to permeate more organizations with information.
Keep the copyright notice and add an open source license. That would seem to fit your argument for permeability.
BTW, how well management listens to employees would be a useful metric for job seekers. Investors too. But I suppose your customers wouldn’t care to have you sell that data.
Copyrights on written material is more about attribution of specific wording than about protection of the idea(s) communicated. Presumably (I have always assumed this!) you write these articles in hopes that your readers will (at least attempt) to put some of the ideas shared in them into practice. Permeability in action 🙂
> What do you think – should I drop the copyright?
No, your expression of your work is unique. When I change jobs I won’t take the SOPs with me. I’ll take enough knowledge that it won’t be hard for me to write something similar, but similar is not identical, and I’ll have to take time to rewrite it.
Perhaps a Creative Commons claim? From what I understand that is close to what you defacto do already.
* More important, should large enterprises share more and protect less?
In the immortal words of the poet: D’uh! CxO who think do that now. Unfortunately, most business leaders run by their gut, not their heads.
Interesting thinking about an issue that seems to be hiding in plain sight, for many. My sense is that people either get it or don’t, though I don’t know for sure why that is.
It might be easiest to explain to upper management clients if you did a very accurate analysis of what happened to 2 San Francisco Bay area professional sports teams in the last 4 years: The San Francisco 49ers and the Golden State Warriors. During this period, neither was ever the most or least talented or experienced team in their league. One managed the fact of their organizational permeability to historic failure, the other to historic success.
Both have been astonishing, even unbelievable, to behold.