Open to Mouth-Shut

It is difficult to keep your mouth shut after reading this news of a passionate entrepreneur who popularised the 'mouthshut.com' website for sharing consumers' knowledge.

I am just echoeing in my inner thoughts that for a burning passion, knowledge management is simply common-sense and will be a sure success.

Time and Knowledge Cycles

In Hindu mythology, time cycles of the earth comprise of four yugas, ‘Sat’, ‘Dredha’, ‘Dwapar’ and ‘Kal’. These times cycle again and again; In the ‘Sat Yuga’, people are completely divine and there is only bliss being present in the human souls; In the ‘Dredha Yuga’, people begin to make differentiation between ‘Divinity’ and ‘Mortality’ and there evolves the conscience of the mind; In the ‘Dwapar Yuga’, people start having ‘Body’ consciousness and thus begins sensory interests; In the ‘Kal Yuga’, people are controlled by their desires and greed and hence the enormous struggles and battles amongst themselves, self destroying.

I am trying to make analogy that ‘Knowledge’ may also be conceived to be realised by us in four parts of a cycle. The first part, similar to the ‘Sat Yuga’, comprises of the ‘Absolute Knowledge’ or the ‘Truth’ in built into our consciousness as ‘Sat’ ‘Chit’ and ‘Anand’ which is inseparable from us. The second part, similar to ‘Dredha Yuga’, is the knowledge that is differentiated through our unconscious learning efforts and gained through the emancipation efforts of the soul. The next part of Knowledge, similar to ‘Dwapar Yuga’, would require conscious efforts of learning through what we call as ‘KM tools and Methods’. The last part of the knowledge, at the bottom, like ‘Kal Yug’, would be the one derived through various technologies with their positives and negatives.

The perfect KM cycle would require us to graduate from the present ‘Kal Yug’ to the absolute ‘Sat yug’

Web and the Wife

Two life essentials for the men are the web and the wife; the following are the comparable and contrasting characteristics between the two:

Comparable

· Nowadays, you perform most of your official jobs through the web and most of your domestic jobs through the wife.
· You bookmark your favourite websites and landmark the wife’s favourite shopping sites.
· You can connect to both your web and wife wirelessly
· You can make virtual social networking through the web and physical social networking through the wife
· Your mails are routed through the web and your relations are routed through the wife.
· You have to manage always, the breach of security from the web and the breach of stability from the wife.

Contrasting

· You can unsubscribe to most of the offers in the web, but can only subscribe to all the wife’s offers
· You can delete all your mails in the web without reading them, but cannot avoid wife’s messages without listening to them.
· Web shopping is highly economical and easy, but shopping with wife is highly expensive and tiring
· Web can be looked upon at your convenient time, but your wife has to be looked upon only when she wants and allows.
· Web browser can be shut down, but your wife’s mouth cannot be shut down
· You keep track of your bank accounts in the web, but your wife keeps track of your income-expense accounts.

Advice and Ideas

The people on this earth can be categorised into two fundamental categories; those who provide "Advice" on all sorts of matters and those who detest receiving unsolicited "Advice".

Well! the fundamental trait of the human being to provide and recieve ( wanted or unwanted) 'advice' is increasingly being exploited in the networld.

There are many sites who are designed to assimilate and act as a portal for differnt categories of 'Advice'. The site www.advice.com and the desi variety www.ideacrux.com are worth trying to visit and participate.

It is for you, the reader, to accept this advice or not!

Unique Transformation

A unique Indian IT firm which set the pace for the Indian IT industry, Infosys, is again in the news, as its chief executive, Nandan Nilekeni will now head the unique ID to the citizens of India project.

This is an interesting transformation for a Corporate citizen to become a Social Service Leader and Provider. The unique ID project would be a mammoth and challenging task as it is expected to capture the information and characteristics of all the citizens of this more than one billion country. The unique ID card being a smart one may also accumulate the knowledge potential of its holders and if it is done, would be one of the largest such Knowledge Base in the world.

Here is wishing Nandan Nilekeni to achieve unique success in his new avatar!!

Performance - Confidential or Communicated?

Government of India has now agreed to the Supreme Court's direction that the so called "Annual Confidential Reports" of employees should be shared with them, reterming them as "Annual Performance Appraisal Report".

It is still a long way to go for Government Organisations to keep Bureaucracy and Transparency on simultaneous scales, but the wheels of the "Knowledge Age" is beginning its slow turning everywhere and Govt can't be an exception.

Still a better way to improve the system would be to involve the employees face to face while preparing the APAP. Are there better practices somewhere out in Governments in other Knowledge Economies ?

Actions - Right and Wrong

Historically we can observe, organisations go up or down resulting from their actions and the resultant reactions.

It is immaterial that the persons who performed these actions have the knowledge of the nature of these actions. We have innumerable examples right from the mythological times for these phenomena.

During Mahabharata, the Kind Dharma had the knowledge of the ill effects of gambling and Duryodhan did not care to know, however both of them performed the action of gambling and faced the ill consequences of their actions.

So do the current organisations!

The moral is - "Sheer knowledge is ineffective unless transformed into proper and rightful actions!!"

Knowledge Economy goes Rural

You thought that the Knowledge Economy is primarily contributed to and benefits only the well off in the urban parts of the Country. I read a news recently that the BPO outsourcing is fastly emerging as a major sector in the deeper rural pockets of India. They are able to offer economical and productive services to the Corporate sectors due to theri lowers costs, improved connectivity and emerging new enterpreneurship in the rural sides. The whole process is termed as Ruralshoring.

If this idea catches up, India can see the emergence of a new Knowledge Economy covering its entire population.

Cheers to the new Ruralshoring!!

Personal KM ideas

As I am on a vacation trip to the South India, I find that there are many religeous practices that provide enough opportunities for personal KM. Like we celebrate the milestones of reaching 60, 80, 100 years of our elder members in the family, we use the opportunity to mingle with relatives and friends from far off places and renew our contacts. We also learn from the tacit discussions and rituals that take place during the ceremonies and pass on our faith and beliefs to the generations next.

It all the more reiterates the faith that Knowledge is not a new thing to be invented but only to be introspected and discovered from our inner cores.

CKO Humour

First CKO: In the KM kick off meeting, our CEO exhorted all employees to 'dream' towards a new vision for the organisation and make them come alive.

Second CKO: Then what happened?

First CKO: Now the employees are demanding resting rooms and bedding facilities in the office!!

Blogging Birth Day

It is an engulfing feeling, surrounded by emotions of joy, achievement, satisfaction and future aspirations to look back at this time of completion of exactly one year from the beginning of the first post of my blog. I enjoyed every opportunity of interaction with my viewers at every moment of my blogging, trying to attempt a unique combination of 'Knowledge' and 'Productivity" with the underlying "Common Sense" of our day to day happenings.

Here is expecting all of you to wish me continue my blogging journey towards the "Knowledge emancipation" on this wonderful occasion of the first year birth day of this blog!!

Two sides of Learning Organisations

There are two types of organisations; those learning to integrate and those learning to disintegrate.

These are elucidated by the following traditional story:

Once a King of a mighty kingdom took a round of the peripheries of his country and suddenly observed two old somewhat dilapidated palaces side by side inside a forest. His ministers explained to him that those were the past residences of his ancestors and as his father built a new palace, these two were abandoned. The king was struck with a new idea! Why not renovate the old palaces to their past glory? He also wanted to involve his subjects in this noble task.

The king got announced to his subjects the following message" The king is going to renovate the two old palaces left neglected in the old forests; He is ready to spend any amount of fortune to this noble task; those of the common citizens who want to help in the effort, please go and take a look and provide whatever help you can!"

On hearing this message, two group of villagers from 'Sadhbuddhi' and 'Durbuddhi' villages formed two teams. The team from 'Sadhbuddhi' village went to the first palace and after inspection, identified portions of the renovation works where they can contribute their physical and intellectual skills for renovation and set about doing their voluntary actions.

The team from 'Durbuddhi' village went to the second palace, and the team members thought like this, 'The king is in any case going to spend any amount of fortune to renovate this palace, and so why not take those left over items here for our personal use and what difference it will make?" Thinking so, each one of them removed whatever looked attractive and useful to them and carried back to their homes.

When the king visited the location after a few weeks, the first palace stood there somewhat better looking and in the place of the second palace, none existed.

Is not the characteristics of 'learning to integrate' and 'learning to disintegrate' organisations made clear through this KM story?

Knowledge Categories

A research study on KM Frameworks by the German Comeptence Centre of Knowledge Management, gives an interesting finding where "Knowledge" is attempted to be classified into various forms; tacit and explicit being most common one; however there are many more variations - to site a few example - documented and undocumented; objective and subjective; public and proprietary; abstract and concrete; positive and negative; historical and futuristic; so on and on.

Those of us who believe that "Knowledge" is the ever pervading and indestructible spirit of the universe will look at such attempts to classify and bind the knowledge element into categories with mixed concerns; well these classifications serve some purpose of letting users confine to the initial understanding of the subject, but the same may constrain them from engulfing into the larger aspect of KM culture of universal evolution for the better.

As an analogy I can say that water bodies are classified into oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, ponds, streams and so on but we should visualise the common essentiality of 'jal or amrit' pervading all these categories.

On the lighter side, one more Knowledge dichotomy which may get into the list in the future may be, Blogged and Non-blogged Knowledge.!!

Open Innovation

Another interesting KM practice that attracted our attention during the German KM study Mission was the shift of large organisations like Siemens towards "Open Innovation". As I browsed the net for a suitable definition of "Open Innovation", the following by Henry Chesbrough, sprang up:

“Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. [This paradigm] assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.”

We came across some examples of open innovation pilots at Siemens, "Decentralised Energy Systems, Virtual Power Plants, Customer designed mood lighting products, Online monitoring of water quality, Transducer for harsh environment."

Through the idea of Open innovation, it would be possible to tap into vast knowledge potential lying in the external peripheries of an organisation synergising the same with the internal research thus providing win-win situation to all stakeholders and enormous raise in productivity.

In while being Out

KM enables an organisation to continuously learn, not only when its human resources are working for them, but also when they are out of service. One has to be innovative enough to extract the tacit knowledge embedded with the work force even after they have left the company.

In the recent study mission on KM at Germany, I noticed a distinct pattern at Airbus and Bosch where we had plant visits; not only these firms were high tech in their operations, they used their retired plant incharge, who had past their 70s to explain to the study team mission members the intricacies and KM processes of their plants. The pride of their association even after they have left the firms, could be felt from their body language and discussions with us.

What a wonderful way to keep in touch with your ex-workforce and motivate them to contribute from their extensive knowledge of working times and also show case the same to visiting guests! Kudos to the German spirit of human culture cultivation towards KM!!