As the reforms spread to other programs, including undergrad-
uate and executive education, we slowly realized a new problem:
except when there was accidental personal knowledge, the faculty
doing design and delivery were often reinventing the wheel, losing
opportunities to leverage materials and ideas developed for other
programs. All people involved were working harder than they ever
had before: the designing process took much longer when col-
leagues had to agree on objectives, materials, sequence, and other
things that had previously been mostly the province of the indi-
vidual, and delivery was much more complex and demanding,
since everything was new. This meant that not only did patience
wear thin, but people didn’t have time to seek help, or as used to be
said at GE, they were too busy chopping wood to sharpen the ax.
Although I worried a lot about how to manage the knowledge
or how to create a system to do that, it was apparent that it might be
impossible to create one that would be used, for all the reasons oth-
ers who have tried to do it have run into difficulties. In the mean-
time, without great planning, I was automatically starting to serve
as a “switchboard” or “connector” for those with expertise
(“mavens”),^3 linking them together when I knew of mutual interests
or needs to solve problems. My position put me in touch with every-
one, the performance appraisal process meant that I read a great deal
about plans and accomplishments, and my “supervision” of the pro-
gram deans meant that we were constantly discussing program issues
so that I inadvertently became a repository for at least some of the
kind of information that could be shared. After several years of
doing this, I began to become more conscious about it and thought
of my job as the “switchboard of Babson.” Only then did I remem-
ber the old research on how faculty get the latest research findings:
few read the journals, but most know the person who is an obsessive
reader of current research and serves as a walking reference desk.
At the same time, a great deal of knowledge is shared at Bab-
son by what I think of as carriers, people who teach in more than
one program. They get an idea from doing, for example, a custom
executive education program and then bring that into the M.B.A.
program or the undergraduate program. Certain people are both by
286 LEADINGORGANIZATIONALLEARNING