Category: Culture
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What Does a Bad Knowledge-Sharing Culture Look Like?
Over the past ten years, we’ve had the opportunity to visit and work with fifty or sixty companies implementing knowledge management, self-service, and social support. In the process, I’ve come to feel like a bit of a connoisseur of corporate culture—I expect other consultants know exactly what I mean. Shortly after arriving in an office,…
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Hanging Up Your Strategic Framework: Sage Does it Right
In our KCS workshops, we say that the Strategic Framework is the deliverable that’s easiest to push aside…and yet one of the most valuable if done right. The Strategic Framework is a simple way of showing the value of KCS to the company, customers, and employees. Executives set high-level objectives for the organization: “scale the…
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Summer Reading! Lessons Unlearned
Just because a book is full of really great information doesn’t mean it can’t be fun to read. For example, take John Ragsdale’s wonderful first book: Lessons Unlearned: 25 Years in Customer Service. John Ragsdale (@john_ragsdale). Unlike the books I’ve reviewed earlier. I’m not even going to pretend to be objective here: I’m a big…
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Summer Reading! Join the Club
Ah, the club. After 18 perfect holes of golf (after all, we’re not counting the three you shanked into the water on the fifth hole…you were still warming up), there’s nothing better than coming inside to the A/C, taking those silly soft-spikes off, and opening up more great summer reading. Although, honestly, I think Times…
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Summer Reading! The Intention Economy
This blog has no mandatory terms of service, installs no beacons or cookies (that I know about), and vends no third party ads (I hope—let me know if you see one.) That’s just fine with our second Cluetrain Manifesto co-author of the summer reading list, Doc Searls. (I do plug our workshops, but I think…
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Leadership in Action: The KCS Commitment
We wrapped up a KCS design workshop at Carestream Health yesterday. We closed with an exercise I love: the participants spent the last hour presenting what they’d learned, done, and planned to executives. This solidifies the learning, and it’s far more meaningful for executives to hear from the people who will be doing the work…
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KCS is a Whiteboard
At a recent Consortium for Service Innovation team meeting, Adam Strong of Red Hat said something that really resonated with me: “KCS is a whiteboard.” I knew at once what he meant—and it’s a really powerful way of thinking and talking about KCS. I don’t know about you, but there are few things in life…
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Communicating the What and the Why: Intuit Does it Right
Effective, persistent communication is the cornerstone of KCS. Team members need to be engaged emotionally—to feel like they’re part of a big, important quest—and practically—knowing exactly what they need to do. Rather than saying anything more about this, I’m going get out of the way and let one of our customers show you. Having participated…
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Do We Really Have To Do This Globally?
“Oh, sure, I mean, we’ll roll it out globally eventually, but is it really worth it to fly people in from all around the world for a design workshop? Can’t we just figure it out first, and then tell them what to do later? Travel budgets are tight.” Travel budgets are tight, and accommodating global…