Building A Knowledge-Driven Organization - by Robert H. Buckman - About the Authors

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

About the Authors

Robert H. Buckman is Chairman and CEO emeritus of Buckman Laboratories, a chemical company with 1400 associates serving customers in over 80 countries. He is a pioneer in implementing corporate strategy around knowledge sharing, and speaks on knowledge management to audiences around the world. During his years leading Buckman Laboratories, company revenues increased nearly 1000 percent.

For more information, please visit: www.books.mcgraw-hill.com

Building A Knowledge-Driven Organization - by Robert H. Buckman - Reading Suggestions & CONTENTS

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

Reading Suggestions

Reading Time: 7-8 hours, 300 pages in book

Building A Knowledge-Driven Organization is not organized in a truly chronological or sequential fashion. The author develops his thoughts regarding knowledge sharing across organizations as the book progresses. There are key points that he develops in each of the seventeen chapters, although chapter 17 is in reality a review of the whole book. The author does, however, provide the reader with two summary tools that can reduce reading time.

At the conclusion of each chapter is a subheading, “Where Do You Stand?” in which the ideas presented in that chapter are recapitulated in approximately two to three paragraphs in question format to stimulate readers’ thinking in regard to their own businesses or organizations. This section is followed by a more formal chapter summary. Reading these two sections provides a good one- to three-page summary of the chapter, with the added benefit of relating it, or applying it, to readers’ individual situations. If readers go directly to these concluding sections first, they can decide how much of the chapter they need, or want, to read.

Even though key ideas are developed throughout the book, there are, obviously, chapters devoted primarily to certain topics. For example, chapter 1 describes Buckman Laboratories’ specific experience with becoming a knowledge-driven organization; chapter 10 discusses rewarding employees; chapter 15 discusses providing educational and capacity building opportunities for employees; and chapter 16 makes recommendations for measuring outcomes and specific metrics.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: The Buckman Labs Journey
Chapter 2: Technology Is the Easy Part: It’s Culture Change That’s Hard
Chapter 3: How to Start Leading a Knowledge-Driven Company
Chapter 4: Knowledge Sharing Bedrock: Building a Foundation of Trust
Chapter 5: Strip Management of Control over Information
Chapter 6: Build or Buy a Knowledge System: Custom-Made and Off-the-Shelf Solutions
Chapter 7: Turning the IT Department into Something New
Chapter 8: Encourage the Flow of Knowledge
Chapter 9: Let Customers Be Your Guide
Chapter 10: Reward Associates for Sharing What They Know
Chapter 11: Build Critical Mass in the Use of Your Knowledge System
Chapter 12: Strategies for Building Communities That Span the World
Chapter 13: Create Virtual Teams
Chapter 14: New Products and Services Based on Knowledge
Chapter 15: Practical Education: Let Your Associates Grow
Chapter 16: Metrics: Outcomes from the Flow of Knowledge
Chapter 17: The Things No One Can Copy: Speculation for the Future

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

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

Remarks

Today’s marketplace is no longer product-driven, nor is it market-driven; it is knowledge-driven. Companies have to look, as the author points out, for more opportunities with a smaller number of customers. It is important to look for niche markets in which a company can get more value added. It follows, then, that moving toward more complex customer interactions will require mobilization of an organization’s knowledge base, particularly its tacit knowledge (what Buckman describes as “what people hold between their ears and behind their eyeballs”).

The central issue that the author reiterates a number of times (and with good reason) is that building a knowledge-driven organization is not a project. Rather, it is “a complete and open-ended transformation of the organizational model.” It requires an investment, and not simply an investment of money. It has to have support from the top of the organization. “The people in charge have to settle down and live the change, not just provide the resources and recommend it to others.”

Building a knowledge-driven, or knowledge-based organization, is, as the author discusses throughout the book, about redefining the time of equation of work, it is about redefining how work is done. The focus is therefore put on the organization’s needs, and how to meet those needs as rapidly and as efficiently as possible. Buckman does not see a trade-off between speed and quality, saying rather, that it is often “a perception thing.” He believes that “when you build the capacity to move faster and faster as an organization, the quality will rise along with the speed.”

In Buckman’s philosophy, the Community of One concept described earlier becomes the new organizational model for business. Businesses become organized around “issue-driven” communities, i.e., groups that are designed to take action on a particular, pressing issue, a problem that needs immediate attention, or an opportunity that will disappear if it is not seized upon. This process inevitably redefines the organization’s structure as a network rather than the traditional hierarchy. He makes the point that issue-driven communities are not the same as what are often called “communities of practice,” a term introduced in the early 1990s by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave. “I prefer to differentiate between the two, however, because of the significant difference in the sense of urgency and the diverse population required to create the dynamic character I regard as the essential feature of an Issue-Driven Community.” Communities of Practice, at least in Buckman’s view, function more as groups with similar interests (for example, the researchers in a company, the marketing staff, the R&D staff) who take longer, slower looks at developments in their field.

Following Buckman’s model for a knowledge-driven organization, command-and-control management is gone forever. Therefore, what the author recommends is really quite revolutionary, changing the traditional hierarchical, vertical, command-and-control management structure to a networked, horizontal structure, which he concedes, near the close of the book, is not necessarily an option for every organization.

Building A Knowledge-Driven Organization - by Robert H. Buckman - MAKING THE CHANGE

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

MAKING THE CHANGE

You need to encourage change in the direction that you want to go. Culture change cannot be demanded; it can only be encouraged by opening the windows of opportunity for change. Just be sure the new direction is tied in with your strategy, so that you do not have your people chasing something that will not take them—or you—in the direction you want to go.

If you want the kind of productivity that comes from knowledge sharing backed by the wholehearted and willing support of all your associates, you have to set things up so the effort is personally valuable to them. And then you have to keep building the system so that the effort becomes more and more valuable as time passes.

The best way to solve your problems is to focus on your business opportunities—on what your customers want. Let the organizational model flow to where you have what you need to meet the needs of the customers as you go into the future.

How does an organization make the change to a networked organization built around the flow of information and knowledge? By getting people to assume responsibility for making things happen. The first requisite is to develop the culture of knowledge sharing within the organization to the point where the response to the customer becomes automatic, without any central command structure to compel people to take action. The second requisite is to develop online learning so that it can be delivered over the organizational network to anybody in the organization, wherever and whenever it is needed. The third requisite is to put all this together so that employees will have the confidence—and the authority—to give customers whatever they need.

As Buckman discovered, technology is the easy part; the hard part is the culture change that has to take place within an organization. In terms of technology, the author recommends choosing software and hardware that will provide a communication infrastructure 24/7, on both the server and the individual side because knowledge-based work takes place anytime, anywhere, especially in a global organization. The system should be “people-centric,” so that it is easy to use, and people will use it. Knowledge becomes an organizational resource. For example, at Buckman Laboratories, the IT department was revamped into the KT department, a move which was aligned with the company’s strategy not to simply store and secure information, but to leverage the collective knowledge of the entire organization to serve Buckman Laboratories’ customers. In this way, the company gained a competitive edge that was both sustainable and global. “The basic ability to handle information and knowledge is changing for the better every day. To take advantage of these improvements, it is essential to push the development of knowledge systems that will help redefine the time equation of work.”

In understanding how to create culture change, it is important to differentiate between knowledge management and knowledge sharing. Knowledge management is a process of organizing what is already known. According to Buckman, “dynamics of a company don’t change when it organizes specific knowledge.” Knowledge sharing, on the other hand, is “engaging people and arousing their interest and trust, making them willing to move their knowledge across the organization to where it was needed, when it was needed.” To accomplish this, the company has to build a culture of trust. People have to trust the information they receive, and they have to have a high degree of trust in each other.

By getting involved with each other, people grow more comfortable in the building of relationships across time and space. Through socialization, they begin building the trust that allows the dialogue to move to the next level by sharing more substantive discussions. One of the means by which Buckman Laboratories built trust virtually was through employee access to an electronic break room, which the author sees as comparable to building morale and a company culture in much the same way as Industrial Age firms did with employee cafeterias and company picnics.

Organizations have to make work across time and space possible. It has to be made desirable for people, and it has to be safe, which means that computer systems have to be based on the realities of “distributed use.” In establishing a knowledge-driven organization, one of the benefits will be what the author describes as a break-up of internal competition, with a resulting advantage in cooperation. “When people share what they know, as opposed to simply passing along the output of what they do, their whole outlook toward work changes radically.”

Knowledge-driven work takes place in virtual open space meetings, which are on-going discussions of customer needs, and solutions, that flow back and forth around the world. Virtual open space meetings operate on four basic principles: 1) Whenever it starts is the right time; 2) Whoever comes into the group (discussion) is right for the group (i.e., in helping to solve the problem or provide the solution); 3) Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened; and 4) When it’s over, it’s over.

In addition to spontaneous virtual open space meetings, there are times, Buckman acknowledges, when certain projects will have a definite beginning and end, or assignments will require a group of employees with specific expertise. In these instances, there is a need to create virtual teams to carry out these projects. These are teams that are formed by management to accomplish specific tasks, and to accomplish their goals in the shortest amount of time possible. Therefore, the teams need to operate within established protocols for interaction. Virtual teams are much like traditional face-to-face teams. Virtual team members, however, may be quite geographically dispersed, and rely on technology as their means of communication and interaction. Many organizations will find themselves with “part virtual teams.” The author gives these kinds of teams astronomical designations. There are, for example, “planets,” team members who share a physical location, while the other members—“moons”—are located in dispersed geographical locations.

Rewards for employees, particularly for those who adopt the new way of working early and use it well and often, are almost inherent. People derive—so the author believes—an intrinsic sense of reward from being able to help others, which then stimulates a desire to be helpful. And, in virtual communities, the opportunities for helping—and being helped—are multiplied many times over when compared with traditional face-to-face interactions. Further involving employees in the process of feedback and continuous improvement of the system sends a message to employees that they are important, and that their opinions matter. Buckman even recommends that those who do the best job of knowledge sharing be upgraded to the latest hardware and software more quickly than those who might be hesitant to get involved in knowledge sharing. And, of course, pay does still matter. Those who do the best job of knowledge sharing should have pay increases tied to their actions that benefit the whole organization, and not to their position on the organizational chart.

Knowledge sharing only takes an organization so far by making it more efficient and effective. The next question is how does new knowledge come into an organization? Institutional learning expert and MIT professor Peter Senge has outlined three ways: research, practice, and capacity building. Although the first two are important and necessary, the author focuses here on capacity building, “setting things up so your people keep growing, by giving them both informal and formal opportunities to learn new things.” The goal of any business is to continue to grow, to increase its competitive edge which means considering what its knowledge base should be five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years going forward. Building employees’ competencies and strengths is crucial. The same technology that permits knowledge sharing across an organization also makes education possible across time and space, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional classroom-based education.

Buckman Laboratories developed its own e-learning department, which it calls The Learning Center. The Center promotes company-wide globalization efforts, productivity improvement programs, and process improvement programs. It serves as a change agent, and as a source of leadership development to produce what Buckman calls “internal management bench strength.” It also focuses on individual skill development and on managing the process of career development in the company. Finally, it helps employees learn to work efficiently with customers and suppliers. The Buckman Learning Center uses a blended approach to education. Coursework may be face-to-face, online synchronous, online asynchronous, or self-paced. The most important element is “the seamless transition among the different forms to achieve the best transfer of knowledge to the student.”

People will not, however, willingly share their knowledge with others if their workplace culture does not support learning, cooperation, and openness. In most instances, the culture change will take place in three phases, or cycles. The first cycle is marked, usually, by incredulity rooted in a fear of the proposed change. The second cycle involves realization that the change is not going to go away, that it is for real. Finally, in the third phase, employees begin to accept, and to commit to, the new way(s) of doing things.

For Buckman, the “ultimate payoff of the change to a knowledge-sharing organization is that you learn to react to your customers’ needs as they feel them—perhaps even before they feel them—cementing your relationships and enhancing your income at the earliest possible moment.” This is what, Buckman believes, redefines value added to customers and achieves competitive advantage. However, it is necessary to have measures of customer effectiveness that track what customers want, and a measurement of knowledge sharing that tracks what it is contributing to the organization’s success. The focus should be on outcomes rather than on processes. One important metric is focused speed. Is the company reaching conclusions, and therefore solutions, faster than the competition? Another important metric is innovation. How much distance is the company putting between itself and the competition? “Whether you are dealing with a product or a service, the need is the same: to measure innovation as part of the outcome that is generated. And the best place to measure the outcome is as it is accepted and paid for by the customer.”

Peter Drucker has pointed out that knowledge work is the key to economic growth now and in the future. Neither resources nor capital can create an ongoing competitive edge in the face of superior knowledge. Organizations have to know what they want, and they have to know if their actions are producing what they want. People must be able to concentrate on results that promote the organization’s overall purpose—without being distracted by approvals and procedures. Companies must, says the author, “be organized for constant change. The company must be organized for innovation. Innovation is essential to survival in a fast-changing world. That means we have to work on the assumption that perpetual destruction of existing approaches is the norm.”

***
References and a subject index are provided.

Building A Knowledge-Driven Organization - by Robert H. Buckman - THE ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING

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

THE ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING

People who see a need should not have to wait until management makes up its mind to do something. For today’s volatile markets, success and even survival demand an organic organization capable of responding instantly when conditions demand it.

Bob Buckman discovered that an organization positioned for the future has to be organized around knowledge—creating, sharing, capturing, and then applying it—rather than around structures or processes. The six essential principles for successful knowledge sharing are the following: 1) Focus on the most critical need of the organization, with the organization’s systems supporting its strategy; 2) Build trust by emphasizing fundamental virtues rather than values; 3) Share knowledge and best practices; 4) Solve customer problems rapidly; 5) Allow employees to solve the problems they encounter without interference from management; and 6) Inject customer feedback into the new product development process.

The critical need of most organizations is to generate cash flow on the front line with the customer. What the company must do to meet this need becomes the basis for the organization’s strategy. A company must know the kind of value it intends to provide and to whom. “Intellectual capital is meaningless without the old-fashioned objectives of serving customers and beating competitors.” Strategy, then, needs to be linked to measurable improvements in performance. “The point of a knowledge-based strategy is not to save the world; it’s to make money.” With that being said, here is a key paradox: “Knowledge for knowledge’s sake lacks performance discipline, but efforts to engineer knowledge in some cold, bloodless way subverts the human dimensions of learning. The trick is to balance the ‘hard’ with the ‘soft’—tapping the knowledge locked in people’s experience.” To do this, an organization must organize its systems, and its efforts, around the flow of information and knowledge to satisfy its most critical needs, rather than focusing on where people happen to be geographically. The organization has to have a “people-centric” system that builds trust among the participants.

Knowledge sharing in the business environment requires “a level of trust not far removed from what most of us feel with our immediate family and close friends.” This kind of trust, however, represents an ongoing challenge in a global organization. To build this kind of trust, people must focus on what they believe, both individually and collectively. Several key elements must be present for such a culture of trust to exist in an organization. First, the employees must trust the organization. Second, the author has found four “kinds of behavior” or “dispositions” that he believes are almost universal: justice (acting honestly and fairly, keeping promises); temperance (acting with self-discipline, avoiding overt self-service); prudence (displaying practical wisdom and the ability to choose well in any situation); and fortitude (showing strength of mind and character and having the courage to persevere in the face of adversity). Corporate culture—any corporate culture—must reflect these four basic virtues. Third, the company’s statement of values must govern decisions at all times, and at all levels of the company.

Knowledge has no commercial value unless it moves across an organization and results in new actions. “Today, it’s essential to reverse the desire to hoard knowledge so as to achieve power.” With this premise as a guiding philosophy, the most powerful individuals become those recognized as sources of knowledge. To accomplish this, according to Buckman, it is necessary for an organization to build values into the organization that are consistent with the values of the people. Buckman Laboratories, for example, provides as much job security as possible for its employees. It has a no-layoff policy, and has maintained it in good economic times and bad for more than 50 years.

Another element is the quality of the day-to-day relationship between the company and its people. Buckman Laboratories demonstrated its confidence in its employees by handing out laptop computers and by encouraging people to use them on their own time, and for their own purposes. The company also opens as many windows of opportunity as possible for its employees to grow to be the best they can be professionally. It does this by establishing a culture of continual learning, and by encouraging the development of personal and professional skills and knowledge at the company’s expense. Trust, in the Buckman Laboratories experience, has turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In solving problems, organizations have to be able to tap into the best that they have to offer, with the challenge being to locate the best information—the knowledge—that the organization has. In today’s business environment, customers who have millions of dollars at stake while waiting for a solution to a problem, will go to the organization that is the first to come up with a workable solution. To succeed today, employees have to be able to “think on the spot,” and be able to get the information they need to make decisions.

At Buckman Laboratories, the author discovered, the fastest way to get a solution to a customer’s problem was to empower the employee who saw the need for it. The employee on the spot—on the front line—is the one with the greatest interest in providing the solution. Meeting customers’ needs not only improves employees’ reputation with customers, it also increases the quality of employees’ future interaction with customers, improves employees’ job satisfaction. As a result, employee income tends to increase as well. By giving employees the freedom to solve customer problems, employees can control, usually in a positive manner, the outcome.

One of the biggest challenges managers will face, particularly middle managers, in the implementation of open systems of communication, is “the attack they perceive on their power base. People in management, particularly in middle management, develop a lot of their power and prestige by controlling the flow of information and knowledge to and from people.” To implement open communication in a networked model of knowledge sharing, the traditional power base of the organization has to be redefined from one of controlling the flow of information and knowledge to one of helping the people around them succeed.

Customers are truly the experts on what they want and need, and are willing to buy. An important secondary benefit of knowledge sharing throughout the organization is that the needs of the customer become known throughout the organization. This knowledge of customers’ needs allows the company to create or produce product or service innovations needed to meet customers’ future needs. It is a company’s responsiveness to customer needs, and its ability to innovate to meet those needs quickly that determines its ability to improve the value added for the customer. “The only innovations that matter are the ones the customer is willing to pay for.”

Building relationships of trust and continuity with customers is what makes this possible. The proportion of people in the organization working on customer relationships relative to the total organization determines the company’s momentum in the market. The quality of the people that an organization can bring to its customer relationships determines the level at which it can operate in these relationships. Therefore, the higher the quality of the individuals involved, the higher the quality of the knowledge brought to bear on any problem the customer presents, a process Buckman Laboratories calls being “effectively engaged on the front line.” The author describes the core of this concept as “the Community of One,” which means that “people need the capacity to function independently, and to hook up with anyone else as needed.” In a knowledge-driven organization, speed of response—and ultimately, of innovation—is critical to a company’s ability to differentiate itself from the competition.

Building A Knowledge-Driven Organization - by Robert H. Buckman - HOW KNOWLEDGE SHARING BEGAN AT BUCKMAN LABORATORIES

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

HOW KNOWLEDGE SHARING BEGAN AT BUCKMAN LABORATORIES

The ability to apply our collective knowledge across time and space has allowed us to compete globally with rivals many times our size, and it may well be what has kept us in business as the market changed around us.

Communications is human nature; knowledge sharing is human nurture.
--Alison Tucker, Buckman Laboratories

When the author found himself running the family’s company in the early 1980s, following the deaths of his father and brother, he found that lack of information and knowledge seemed to be at the root of the company’s major problems. He was strongly influenced by Scandinavian Airlines’ former chairman, Jan Carlzon, whose operating philosophy was that “an individual without information cannot take responsibility; an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility,” and he began implementing this philosophy at Buckman Laboratories as the company’s game plan for the future.

What was becoming clear to Buckman was that every time the organization added a new operating company in another country, it improved customer service in that country, but it made it harder to move knowledge and experience across the organization. Buckman Laboratories’ team of experts could not move around the world fast enough to meet customers’ rapidly changing needs, and it became clear that they could not have people travel more. It had become a physical impossibility to meet customers’ needs solely with face-to-face meetings.

As a result, as the company began experimenting with the technology available at that time to transfer knowledge, Buckman began to understand the characteristics of a knowledge-sharing system, which he summarizes as follows: 1) Reduce the number of transmissions to one so as to achieve the least distortion of the knowledge being transferred; 2) Give everyone access to the knowledge; 3) Let everyone enter knowledge; 4) Make sure the system works whenever and wherever anyone wants to use it; 5) Make the system easy to use; and 6) Allow communication in any language.

In 1992, Buckman Laboratories created a new department, called Knowledge Transfer (KT), consolidating information services, telecommunications, and the company library. By bringing these departments together as one, and having the head of that department report directly to the CEO, the lines of authority were simplified, and knowledge sharing became easier. KT’s mission was to respond to global knowledge needs by planning and managing the resources necessary to rapidly disseminate Buckman Laboratories’ collective industry, technical, and market knowledge. It provided easy, and rapid, access to the company’s global knowledge bases and the sharing of best practices with all Buckman affiliates. In 1994, the company introduced “K’Netix, The Buckman Knowledge Network,” as the umbrella under which different programs and systems were housed. It now covers electronic forums, online libraries, a knowledge base, email, Internet and World Wide Web access, the company’s Intranet, project-tracking systems, customer relationship management systems, groupware, bulletin boards, and virtual conference rooms. This approach to communication enabled Buckman Laboratories to become a knowledge-drive organization.

The increasing interaction Buckman Laboratories experienced among its affiliates worldwide serves to illustrate two key concepts (or benefits) of a knowledge-driven organization: an increased span of communication and an increased span of influence for all employees. Online interactions, made possible by technology, eliminate physical distance as a factor in communication, and at the same time, reduce social distance, making issues such as positional power, age, ethnic and gender differences easier to set aside. An increased span of influence, then, follows naturally. “If anyone can talk to anyone, what matters is who listens—and why. Influence—power—accumulates around the people who make the most sense, and the whole social structure begins to slide into new patterns.” Buckman Laboratories has thrived, according to the author, because all employees—or associates, as they are called—have the same opportunity to expand their span of influence.

The networked organization Buckman developed became even more powerful than he originally imagined because it allowed for the redefinition of the time equation of work (the widely shared assumptions in any group about how long a task, or group of tasks, should take). “Instead of days and weeks, we now could do things in hours or at most in a few days.” Buckman Laboratories became a totally transformed organization. “It began with a technological network, evolved into business networks, and then transformed again into a fully networked way of life.”

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.