- There’s Nothing for the CKO or CLO to Do
The hiring of a chief knowledge officer (CKO) or chief learning
officer (CLO) in a company provides the other corporate execu-
tives with a greater sense of job security. They now know that they
won’t be the first person let go in the next round of layoffs. More
than 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies had CKOs at the peak
of the KM craze, but less than 20 percent of them have one today.
A recent Wall Street Journalarticle chronicled the profession’s chal-
lenge to define its worth to corporate America.^9 An industry con-
sultant says that “CKOs are like a vitamin pill. They make you feel
good, but in a bear market the only thing that really sells is
painkillers.”^10 The CKO or CLO position implies that it’s possible
(or desirable) for an individual or department to “manage” the
knowledge of others. This is the same flaw that we saw in the
beginning of the quality movement, when corporate quality depart-
ments arose to preach and teach continuous quality improvement.
It wasn’t until leaders like Larry Bossidy of AlliedSignal (now
Honeywell) and Jack Welch of GE established Six Sigma as a way
of doing business, not just a department, that many firms finally saw
sustainable benefits from the exact same quality tools introduced
years earlier.
- It’s Cultural
To overcome the barriers to sharing information, a company has
to modify its corporate culture to overcome the natural aversion to
doing this. Carla O’Dell, president of the American Productivity
and Quality Center, says that of the companies trying KM, fewer
than 10 percent have succeeded in making it part of their culture.^11
Even companies with strong information-sharing systems fall into
this trap.
At Ford Motor Company, the Best Practices Replication
Process has delivered “billion-dollar benefits for the automaker.”^12
However, this sophisticated system didn’t allow Ford to spot the
issues in the Firestone tires it placed on its Explorer SUVs. “Why
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