, Contents
Introduction
PART ONE
Laying the Foundations
1 The Problem: Losing Critical Knowledge
2 What Do You Need to Know about Knowledge?
3 Setting Up Knowledge Transfer: The Players Involved
PART TWO
Tools and Techniques
4 Smart Questioning
5 Capturing Deep Smarts—with Help
6 Accelerating the Transfer of Tacit Knowledge
7 Assessing the Transfer of Deep Smarts
8 The GE Global Research Centers Story
9 Socializing the Organization
Introduction
Do any of the following situations sound familiar?
1. You’ve been hearing about the baby boomer retirements for years—but now the tsunami is upon
you. The senior ranks of managers, scientists, and engineers are heading out for Sun City, and it is
going to be challenging to fill the void. A lot of projects will be delayed or canceled for lack of
seasoned employees. Of course, some of what is in their heads is obsolete. But how much? And
what parts? What knowledge can and should be passed along to less experienced colleagues?
2. You’ve been hiring talented young engineers and managers the past few years, but they’re …
different. They are very social, but prefer texting and tweeting to face-to-face meetings. And they
really don’t like to use telephones—even for sales! These Gen-Y folks, or millennials, are
impatient to move up the organizational ladder and don’t expect to spend twenty years in the same
company. They have some great new ideas, such as using social media to interact with customers.
But how do you integrate these ideas into the organizational culture?
3. You’ve just acquired a smaller company with some terrific new technical capabilities. The lawyers
and accountants have been duly diligent for months now, but you are still not sure how much of
the technology is really documented. How much will you have to rely on what’s in the heads of
the brilliant founders? What will be the value of the acquisition if they leave as soon as they are
allowed to cash their retention bonuses and take their smarts with them?
4. Your product and service teams are scattered around the globe. It’s great that someone in East Asia
is working while your US team members are sleeping—and your electronic communication
systems allow you to get really quick responses to a given specific problem. But how do you
progress individuals and teams from competence to expertise, given that your experts are so
dispersed?
All of these scenarios have a common challenge, and some common solutions. Whether you
are a chief technology officer (CTO) overseeing a loss of experienced engineers; a chief
information officer (CIO) who needs to keep software systems up and running regardless of
,departures; or a human resource director responsible for developing and retaining human capital,
you will grapple with these questions: How can the business-critical, experience-based
knowledge—what we call deep smarts—of a subject-matter expert or highly experienced manager
possibly be transferred? When is it necessary or worthwhile? Will the transfer process take forever,
or are there shortcuts?
Some readers already recognize the seriousness of the problem and are looking for solutions.
But there are others who may be more skeptical. Perhaps you question the need for knowledge
transfer; perhaps expert is linked in your mind with anti-innovation or old school. Some expertise
should certainly not be targeted for transfer. That’s why this book is about critical knowledge, not
all knowledge. Moreover, it is about a particular subset of expertise—that which is experience
based and still mostly undocumented, contained in the heads and hands of your employees.
While you have superb access to what you might call know-what, that is, facts, algorithms,
well-documented processes, and the knowledge obtained through formal education or readily
available on the web, so do your competitors. Such information is not as competitively valuable
as the less imitable deep smarts in your organization—what the most valuable employees have
learned to do—their know-how. That expertise includes such skills as the ability to diagnose and
anticipate problems, relate to customers, make swift and wise judgment calls. Such know-how has
a long shelf life and will be valuable well into the future; hence the need to transfer it to the next
generation of managers and subject-matter experts.
You might wonder why, in this age of smartphones, driverless cars, and “big data,” we choose
to focus on the knowledge in peoples’ heads, and on transferring that knowledge from one person
to another, usually directly. We are certainly aware of the many benefits offered by technological
advances: electronic tools that aid communication, computerized simulations that can provide a
vicarious learning-by-doing experience, and increasingly sophisticated decision-support systems
that can capture some expertise. But such systems rarely can stand alone—at best, they require a
partnership with humans. Analysis of big data requires human judgment to see the patterns and
develop plausible theories from statistical correlations. Eric Schadt, director of the Icahn Institute
for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, comments on the need to present information and data “in
a way that engages the human mind, which is a pretty amazing pattern recognition machine …
Maybe 10, 20 years down the road, computers like [IBM’s] Watson … are going to be good enough
to where the human intervention is less. But today, that’s not true.”1
In one volume, we couldn’t possibly cover all the myriad ways that software systems can
complement the judgment of deeply smart people. Nor are such systems our own primary area of
expertise. You may have the opportunity to consider which deep smarts can be conveyed through
such media and which are best left to human judgment. But in this book, we concentrate on the
advantages of utilizing human “wetware.” We therefore offer the reader insights and practical
advice based on our deep grounding in human behavior and decades of experience with, and
research on, knowledge transfer.
This book is written for the manager who suspects, or knows for certain, that vital knowledge
is leaking out of the organization during job transitions of many kinds and who wishes to stanch
the flow. The aim is to stop costly knowledge rework, without eliminating the potential for
innovation.
We’ve organized the book into two parts (figure I-1), so that you may skim what might already
be familiar and home in on our discussion of tools and techniques.
FIGURE I-1
Road map of the book
, Part 1 provides the foundations for the rest of the book. Chapter 1 examines the costs of losing
know-how. After all, if there is no reason for concern, why consider preserving knowledge? We
report on what top executives we surveyed say their organizations are doing about those losses.
In chapter 2, we focus on exactly what constitutes the business-critical and experience-based
knowledge that is most valuable to your organization. You can’t very well design transfer
initiatives without a strong grasp of exactly what is to be transferred. The word knowledge covers
too much territory. There are various types of knowledge, and they need to be transferred
differently. Chapter 3 shows how to identify the critical knowledge and enlist the players who will
be essential to any successful knowledge-transfer effort.
Part 2 covers the practical aspects of knowledge transfer. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 provide specific
transfer options, with examples of tools and techniques. Some are appropriate for situations in
which time is short, the need is critical, or resources are scarce. Under these circumstances, only
the most easily accessible types of knowledge can be transferred. Other techniques are most
effective when the organization has the luxury of time and can transfer more of the tacit, less
accessible dimensions of deep smarts. Chapter 7 covers methods to assess the success of
knowledge-transfer programs. In chapter 8, we bring you a tale from the trenches, with a detailed
account of how GE’s renowned Global Research Centers set up a knowledge-transfer program.
And in chapter 9, we discuss how an organization can be socialized to accept knowledge-transfer
initiatives, and we suggest ways to overcome common obstacles faced by managers in setting up
such programs.
At the end of each chapter, we pose some questions designed to help you think about the issues
that have been discussed and to create some action items for you or your staff. While most of these
questions are directed at those of you who will be managing knowledge transfer, we also offer one
or two questions for you to share with your team members to consider when they are knowledge-
transfer recipients.
By the time you finish reading, you will have a comprehensive overview of knowledge
transfer, including these important aspects of the process:
• The costs associated with knowledge loss
• The kinds of knowledge you need to preserve and pass along
• How to identify those valuable knowledge assets
• Proven tools and techniques being used by organizations to address both urgent and longer-term
needs to transfer experience-based expertise—both technical and managerial
• The specific steps one organization went through to take on the challenge of preserving its world-
class know-how
• How to socialize your organization, namely, how to persuade the people whose help you need that
they too will benefit from a knowledge-transfer initiative
Introduction
PART ONE
Laying the Foundations
1 The Problem: Losing Critical Knowledge
2 What Do You Need to Know about Knowledge?
3 Setting Up Knowledge Transfer: The Players Involved
PART TWO
Tools and Techniques
4 Smart Questioning
5 Capturing Deep Smarts—with Help
6 Accelerating the Transfer of Tacit Knowledge
7 Assessing the Transfer of Deep Smarts
8 The GE Global Research Centers Story
9 Socializing the Organization
Introduction
Do any of the following situations sound familiar?
1. You’ve been hearing about the baby boomer retirements for years—but now the tsunami is upon
you. The senior ranks of managers, scientists, and engineers are heading out for Sun City, and it is
going to be challenging to fill the void. A lot of projects will be delayed or canceled for lack of
seasoned employees. Of course, some of what is in their heads is obsolete. But how much? And
what parts? What knowledge can and should be passed along to less experienced colleagues?
2. You’ve been hiring talented young engineers and managers the past few years, but they’re …
different. They are very social, but prefer texting and tweeting to face-to-face meetings. And they
really don’t like to use telephones—even for sales! These Gen-Y folks, or millennials, are
impatient to move up the organizational ladder and don’t expect to spend twenty years in the same
company. They have some great new ideas, such as using social media to interact with customers.
But how do you integrate these ideas into the organizational culture?
3. You’ve just acquired a smaller company with some terrific new technical capabilities. The lawyers
and accountants have been duly diligent for months now, but you are still not sure how much of
the technology is really documented. How much will you have to rely on what’s in the heads of
the brilliant founders? What will be the value of the acquisition if they leave as soon as they are
allowed to cash their retention bonuses and take their smarts with them?
4. Your product and service teams are scattered around the globe. It’s great that someone in East Asia
is working while your US team members are sleeping—and your electronic communication
systems allow you to get really quick responses to a given specific problem. But how do you
progress individuals and teams from competence to expertise, given that your experts are so
dispersed?
All of these scenarios have a common challenge, and some common solutions. Whether you
are a chief technology officer (CTO) overseeing a loss of experienced engineers; a chief
information officer (CIO) who needs to keep software systems up and running regardless of
,departures; or a human resource director responsible for developing and retaining human capital,
you will grapple with these questions: How can the business-critical, experience-based
knowledge—what we call deep smarts—of a subject-matter expert or highly experienced manager
possibly be transferred? When is it necessary or worthwhile? Will the transfer process take forever,
or are there shortcuts?
Some readers already recognize the seriousness of the problem and are looking for solutions.
But there are others who may be more skeptical. Perhaps you question the need for knowledge
transfer; perhaps expert is linked in your mind with anti-innovation or old school. Some expertise
should certainly not be targeted for transfer. That’s why this book is about critical knowledge, not
all knowledge. Moreover, it is about a particular subset of expertise—that which is experience
based and still mostly undocumented, contained in the heads and hands of your employees.
While you have superb access to what you might call know-what, that is, facts, algorithms,
well-documented processes, and the knowledge obtained through formal education or readily
available on the web, so do your competitors. Such information is not as competitively valuable
as the less imitable deep smarts in your organization—what the most valuable employees have
learned to do—their know-how. That expertise includes such skills as the ability to diagnose and
anticipate problems, relate to customers, make swift and wise judgment calls. Such know-how has
a long shelf life and will be valuable well into the future; hence the need to transfer it to the next
generation of managers and subject-matter experts.
You might wonder why, in this age of smartphones, driverless cars, and “big data,” we choose
to focus on the knowledge in peoples’ heads, and on transferring that knowledge from one person
to another, usually directly. We are certainly aware of the many benefits offered by technological
advances: electronic tools that aid communication, computerized simulations that can provide a
vicarious learning-by-doing experience, and increasingly sophisticated decision-support systems
that can capture some expertise. But such systems rarely can stand alone—at best, they require a
partnership with humans. Analysis of big data requires human judgment to see the patterns and
develop plausible theories from statistical correlations. Eric Schadt, director of the Icahn Institute
for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, comments on the need to present information and data “in
a way that engages the human mind, which is a pretty amazing pattern recognition machine …
Maybe 10, 20 years down the road, computers like [IBM’s] Watson … are going to be good enough
to where the human intervention is less. But today, that’s not true.”1
In one volume, we couldn’t possibly cover all the myriad ways that software systems can
complement the judgment of deeply smart people. Nor are such systems our own primary area of
expertise. You may have the opportunity to consider which deep smarts can be conveyed through
such media and which are best left to human judgment. But in this book, we concentrate on the
advantages of utilizing human “wetware.” We therefore offer the reader insights and practical
advice based on our deep grounding in human behavior and decades of experience with, and
research on, knowledge transfer.
This book is written for the manager who suspects, or knows for certain, that vital knowledge
is leaking out of the organization during job transitions of many kinds and who wishes to stanch
the flow. The aim is to stop costly knowledge rework, without eliminating the potential for
innovation.
We’ve organized the book into two parts (figure I-1), so that you may skim what might already
be familiar and home in on our discussion of tools and techniques.
FIGURE I-1
Road map of the book
, Part 1 provides the foundations for the rest of the book. Chapter 1 examines the costs of losing
know-how. After all, if there is no reason for concern, why consider preserving knowledge? We
report on what top executives we surveyed say their organizations are doing about those losses.
In chapter 2, we focus on exactly what constitutes the business-critical and experience-based
knowledge that is most valuable to your organization. You can’t very well design transfer
initiatives without a strong grasp of exactly what is to be transferred. The word knowledge covers
too much territory. There are various types of knowledge, and they need to be transferred
differently. Chapter 3 shows how to identify the critical knowledge and enlist the players who will
be essential to any successful knowledge-transfer effort.
Part 2 covers the practical aspects of knowledge transfer. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 provide specific
transfer options, with examples of tools and techniques. Some are appropriate for situations in
which time is short, the need is critical, or resources are scarce. Under these circumstances, only
the most easily accessible types of knowledge can be transferred. Other techniques are most
effective when the organization has the luxury of time and can transfer more of the tacit, less
accessible dimensions of deep smarts. Chapter 7 covers methods to assess the success of
knowledge-transfer programs. In chapter 8, we bring you a tale from the trenches, with a detailed
account of how GE’s renowned Global Research Centers set up a knowledge-transfer program.
And in chapter 9, we discuss how an organization can be socialized to accept knowledge-transfer
initiatives, and we suggest ways to overcome common obstacles faced by managers in setting up
such programs.
At the end of each chapter, we pose some questions designed to help you think about the issues
that have been discussed and to create some action items for you or your staff. While most of these
questions are directed at those of you who will be managing knowledge transfer, we also offer one
or two questions for you to share with your team members to consider when they are knowledge-
transfer recipients.
By the time you finish reading, you will have a comprehensive overview of knowledge
transfer, including these important aspects of the process:
• The costs associated with knowledge loss
• The kinds of knowledge you need to preserve and pass along
• How to identify those valuable knowledge assets
• Proven tools and techniques being used by organizations to address both urgent and longer-term
needs to transfer experience-based expertise—both technical and managerial
• The specific steps one organization went through to take on the challenge of preserving its world-
class know-how
• How to socialize your organization, namely, how to persuade the people whose help you need that
they too will benefit from a knowledge-transfer initiative
