Foreword
Any organization that does not continuously seek new sources of
competitive advantage will fade and die. When competitive
advantage is found, it must be nurtured and sustained, but per-
versely, as with all living organisms, it begins to die at birth. The
Holy Grail is unique competitive advantage.
Yet any organization has only one truly unique competitive
advantage: its knowledge. Knowledge that is built up over the his-
tory of the organization and that exists at a point in time across its
geography. So it is the source of life for any company. How strange,
then, that we cannot define knowledge accurately, catalogue it
effectively, or use it efficiently.
Best practice is probably 20 percent utilization. For what other
asset would we accept such low productivity, let alone the one that
is ours uniquely and is essential to sustaining competitive advantage?
Knowledge resides in people—and there’s the rub. People
travel; they leave or retire, taking their knowledge with them.
Corporate memory can be developed and sustained, but it must be
a conscious and continuous process.
Knowledge must be accessible and shared to have value. Peo-
ple need the means and the motivation to share generously. They
need the skill to identify and spread the ideas of value and to avoid
being sucked into a swamp of useless information. One of my pre-
decessors once remarked wistfully, “If only Unilever knew what
Unilever knows.” I would update that remark by adding, “and then
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