Universal Versus Particular KnowledgeA process controller at Motorola once told me that in an attempt
to improve the cleaning process of electronic circuits of global
systems for mobile telecommunication, he came up with the idea
of using sharper brushes. Not only did they clean more effectively,
it turned out, but they also cut through many of the essential cir-
cuits, resulting in more than $100,000 in damage.
Bob Galvin, CEO of Motorola at the time, asked the process
controller to come to his room. Galvin didn’t fire the employee but
instead asked him to write a report on how these types of errors
could be avoided in the future. After reading the report, Galvin
thanked him because the new ideas in the employee’s report would
save the company more than a million dollars. Knowledge man-
agement is effective only when you create an “error-correcting”
system that learns continuously from its mistakes. In the long run,
there is nothing more dangerous than an errorless system.
Individual Versus Team KnowledgePerhaps it is the individualism inherent in American society that
drives our need for knowledge management. Our educational sys-
tems are based on accumulating knowledge individually. Students
are thrown into a competitive game in which only the fittest sur-
vive. However, the organizations in which the graduates come to
work pay a price. More communitarian cultures, such as France and
Japan, face the opposite problem. A Canadian student once
appealed forcefully to our intercultural knowledge and experience.
In his university in Montreal, French students were not playing on
a level field with their American colleagues. Almost all French stu-
dents were cheating during their exams by sharing information
among themselves. Can you justify this by attributing it to cultural
differences in a nonjudgmental way? “Yes, through knowledge
management,” we told him. French people, like the Japanese, have
a much greater talent for joint preparation and the sharing of
knowledge among colleagues.
14 LEADINGORGANIZATIONALLEARNING