Executives today recognize that their firms face a wave of retirements over the next decade as the baby boomers hit retirement age. At the other end of the talent pipeline, the younger workforce is developing a different set of values and expectations, which creates new recruiting and employee retention issues. The evolution from an older, traditional, highly-experienced workforce to a younger, more mobile, employee base poses significant challenges, particularly when considered in the context of the long-term orientation towards downsizing and cost cutting. This is a solution-oriented book to address one of the most pressing management problems of the coming How do organizations transfer the critical expertise and experience of their employees before that knowledge walks out the door? It begins by outlining the broad issues and providing tools for developing a knowledge-retention strategy and function. It then goes on to outline best practices for retaining knowledge, including knowledge transfer practices, using technology to enable knowledge retention, retaining older workers and retirees, and outsourcing lost capabilities.
I'm not much of a fan of management consultant books as I generally find them quite faddish. They usually state that there is a problem, enter a few amusing anecdotes that illustrate what they mean and follow up with some suggested solutions. In that sense this book is no different, but far closer to the Tom Peters academic style than the "One Minute Manager"
However the problem that it discusses struck a resonant chord in me. Years ago I viewed a tape from Texas Instruments that talked about capturing the knowledge of a distillation column engineer for Campbell's soup in a expert system. The gentleman was retiring soon, and the company didn't know what he knew and felt the best approach was to build a system that modelled his expertise. What I never found out was how successful the approach was in the end. (This story is not in the book.)
The basic problem is that through retirement and attrition key knowlege in many organizations disappears. No one knows who knows what nor the value of that knowledge before it is gone. The problem is exascerbated by the huge lump of the baby boomers when they retire. The anecdotes include NASA no longer knowing how to get to the moon any more using Saturn V technology (the plans are lost), Sandia labs needing to retain the knowledge of how to build, test and dismantle nuclear weapons, given that they haven't built or tested a weapon in years, the cost rediscovering wiring and conduits in building that we no longer have the blueprints of. The solution lies in identification, sharing, managing and storytelling. Various success stories are brought out to support the points. Strategies such as Communities of Practice and the U.S. Army's AAR (After Action Review): 1) What was supposed to happen 2) What actually happened 3) Why were there differences 4) What can we learn for next time) are covered.
What de Long doesn't deal with is the cost of collecting this knowledge vs the value received on a per item basis. Localized cost for globalized benefit usually plays poorly in most organizations.
Still the book is well written and enjoyable. I've always been one to define my own job functions. It suggests to me that there is a potential role in any organization as a professional liason between groups and generations of expertise - a possible career choice. The book emphasises the value that is contributed by individuals in the workplace and gets you thinking about the need to transmit the legacy not only of things done well but of things done poorly.
Nearly a decade has gone by since I first read this book, and I'm now a decade closer to retirement. Most of the cohort that were at work when I was first hired have since retired, and every single member of the hiring committee is now gone. Sadly so is their expertise and to a large extent I now represent institutional memory of what has worked, what hasn't worked and why we chose to work in certain ways. Some of this gets passed on, but likely not enough
It is a book that inspires introspection. Worthwhile.
Knowledge management is tricky business. I’ve spent a non-trivial part of my professional career converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge – well, at least one kind of tacit knowledge. This is, in fact, part of the problem. Some of what we call tacit knowledge is really implicit knowledge. That is I know something but I’ve not written down the rules or steps which lead to that knowledge. For instance, I may know the roles in a software development process inherently but haven’t codified them. (You can find where I did this for a series of articles, Cracking the Code: Breaking Down the Software Development Roles.)
Excellent summary of the aging workforce problem and ways to mitigate the loss of expertise. The author does not adequately address the additional issues of the new dynamics, behaviors and expectations of the younger workforce.