Building A Knowledge-Driven Organization - by Robert H. Buckman - Introduction

Introduction
HOW KNOWLEDGE SHARING BEGAN AT BUCKMAN LABORATORIES
THE ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING
MAKING THE CHANGE
Remarks
Reading Suggestions & CONTENTS
About the Authors

Introduction

For Buckman Laboratories, an international specialty chemical company, the knowledge and the solutions that the company offered its customers was limited, for the most part, to that of the employee working directly with the customer. The same is true, by and large, for most companies. At Buckman Laboratories, however, over the years, the company’s CEO, Bob Buckman, came to realize that his company could increase the power it brought to bear for customers if it could focus more than just one mind on solving customers’ problems. Buckman recognized that encouraging people to share knowledge about customer problems as they arose would allow the company to come up with better solutions more quickly, thereby meeting customers’ needs more quickly—and more profitably. For Buckman, that meant learning to move knowledge around the organization to the place it was needed in time for it be useful. Moving knowledge around an organization—across time and space—would require not just the technological capability to move and share information. It would require a corporate culture that encouraged knowledge sharing.