Chapter FiveKnowledge Management Involves
Neither Knowledge nor Management
Marc S. Effron
The death knell for knowledge management (KM) as a concept
was sounded with a Wall Street Journal article chronicling
McKinsey & Co.’s failure to manage its “knowledge” successfully.
The article quotes from an internal McKinsey report that says
despite having the requisite systems in place, “the ability of our
consultants to tap into and effectively leverage our knowledge is
poor.... Our knowledge base is mixed in quality and poorly struc-
tured. It takes much too long to find the right knowledge, and in
many cases, the best existing knowledge is not identified and
brought to the client.”^1 If the world’s most prestigious consulting
firm could not successfully wrangle information, what hope was
there for anyone else?
The failure at McKinsey was not its inability to categorize and
retrieve the volumes of experience from its legions of Harvard-
trained M.B.A.s but rather the widely held Pollyanna-like belief
that knowledge can actually be managed. Even though McKinsey
had published numerous articles outlining the secrets to successful
knowledge management,^2 it too missed the underlying truth. What
is the truth? The truth is that the sheer concept of knowledge man-
agement is fundamentally flawed—it involves neither knowledge
nor management and therefore cannot be expected to succeed.
Though on its face KM seemed like a great idea, it’s time that we
relegated it to that dustbin of history labeled “honorable inten-
tions” and begin to focus instead on helping organizations truly
share the intellectual capital their workers possess.
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