Full Circle Associates

Martin Dugage does a nice review of Jamie S. Walters' Dismantling a Culture of Knowledge-Hoarding . Walters suggests that knowledge hoarding is a cultural issue. Dugage suggests it is also a practice issue:

"If people don't share what they know, it's not only because they are better off keeping it to themselves, but also simply because they don't know how to. Knowledge sharing can be an extremely cumbersome and time-consuming process both from the giving and the taking perspective. It needs methods and tools that must be learned at three levels in the company:

1- at the sponsoring level, top managers must understand how they must walk the talk themselves
2- at the program governance level, managers must understand the social dynamics of knowledge sharing communities, especially CoPs, be genuinely interested in learning more about social networking technology, and stop focusing exclusively on challenging new ideas with business cases and ROIs
3- at the giver/taker level, people must adopt new forms of communication and behavior, and sometimes even learn again some basic writing techniques such as the three level writing of journalists (catchy title, summary, and extended text)."

A pal told me last weekend, culture eats strategy for lunch. This reminds me that practice eats culture for lunch. Or is it that practice embodies culture? I think it's the latter, even though the former sounds cooler. ;-)