Life runs on Knowledge Management

When you drove up to office today, you didn’t just trust your instinct to tell you which turn to take or which intersection to take it at. You may have either depended on your knowledge of the routine, or gone by the signboards and markers. In the bigger picture, ever since the first explorers sailed back home after discovering new lands, how did their successors know what route to take on the next voyage? The maps and charts they painstakingly drew up would have provided guidance for the people who followed their paths. On the road, we were able to clearly demarcate the points and make it easier for travelers of future generations, although this wasn’t directly possible at sea. Perhaps we are looking at one of the first instances of effective Knowledge Management.

For a long time, Knowledge Management has been tied to the idea of “not re-inventing the wheel”. Naturally, people need to make mistakes to learn the best way to do things – remember Edison’s 999 ways of not making a good light bulb and one way to make a good one. But then, the next time anyone wanted to make a light bulb, he/she wouldn’t have to go through all the 999 mistakes to reach the 1000th method. If Edison – or any other inventor - has made a note of what is good and what is bad, the new inventor is able to safely steer through and reach his goal.

In most industries, and especially in the IT industry, a lot of energy often goes into repetitive efforts to solve the same problem over and over again. Where and how does this loss occur? Let’s take a detailed look at it in a future editorial, but for now just keep this in mind: You are spending energy to solve the problem. So why not document the result and save equal amounts of effort at multiple points in future?

The Business Editorial - How, Why and What

Electronics Engineer à Journalist à Content Manager à Corporate Communications Professional

I am probably the only person in the world to have trodden this particular career path. To say the least, the corporate environment of an IT Services company was unfamiliar territory. My primary task was to facilitate Employee Engagement, which until then was something I had never even heard of. To navigate this realm, I had some very basic and highly effective tools – free thinking, common sense, an ability to make logical inferences, and a distrust of clichéd management texts that seem to restrict your thoughts in a way some stranger finds best.  

The best thing that happened to my career here is the responsibility of writing an editorial – a daily thought leadership blog - for the company newsletter. That’s right, every working day the entire company was presented with my thoughts on business, people, and everything that connects the two. I organize the information which I had assimilated - from what I could think up, read about from thoughtful sources, or pick up from casual conversations with some good people – and publish those, . And it worked! ‘The Editorial’ remains a very popular communication channel to reach the employees of our organization, around the world.

Then I realized that what I held in my hands was a treasure trove of unbridled thought leadership material. I decided to open it up for the good of men and women around the world who need some help in making sense of what they do in their careers.

So how regular will I be in updating this? I write one blog post every working day for my company newsletter. My promptness needs no further proof. And on my blog, I don’t have the shackles of whether something is ‘appropriate for a corporate audience’. So let’s make the most of it!