Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Conscious Capitalism Movement 2,526 members Member Arnold Kransdorff Follow Arnold Softly softly KM is STILL falling short Arnold Kransdorff Author, publisher, business historian and specialist in knowledge management and experiential learning From my two-year association with related Linkedin groups, I detect a slightly healthier outlook for Knowledge Management but virtually no acknowledgement by commerce and industry - or even business education - that there is another important dimension to profiting from knowledge capture: the skill of experiential learning (EL). It is no good institutions just capturing their own hard-won and expensively-acquired knowledge and experience. Decision makers must know HOW to apply it to changing circumstances and environments. Experiential learning - a la David Kolb’s inspiring work, and others - is a formalized discipline that business education does NOT teach, they choosing that their students depend on individuals’ memory alone to inspire better decision making. It is an informally undisciplined approach. There is ample evidence to support the more demanding approach to KM. There is, firstly, the acknowledged low level of individuals’ memory retention, illustrated by typical short, selective and defensive recall abilities. Pertinent to our low job tenure rates, there are academic estimates that up to 90% of organizations’ knowledge, including the more important tacit element, is embedded and synthesized in their employers’ heads (not in corporate data banks, as thought) and, finally, that in cases of employee poaching, which accounts for a large proportion of workplace turnover, the performance of high flyers typically falls sharply in new corporate environments and stays well below old achievement levels thereafter. In truth KM and particularly EL requires a more inclusive approach, especially in today’s flexible labor market where institute-specific knowledge and experience exits the corporate consciousness every four or so years, even quicker in the US. In addition to its efforts to capture its transiting knowledge and experience, organizations need to be reassured that its walkabout employees are ABLE to properly learn from its own prior experiences. As things stand, all organizations can depend on is that their new employees can, perhaps, recall their knowledge and experience with OTHER employers. Without the ability to experientially learn properly, their capacity to apply both their own prior experience and their new employer’s experience (that’s IF it’s made available), is severely compromised. All this is commerce and industry’s big black hole, amply confirmed by the pandemic of repeated mistakes, re-invented and other unlearned lessons that litter commerce and industry. KM is like history. Accurately recalled and PROPERLY applied, it provides experience cheaply. Follow http://biggernumbers.wordpress.com/ (no title) biggernumbers.wordpress.com The Death of Wisdom: Why Our Companies Have Lost It--and How They Can Get It... Like Comment (1) Unfollow Reply Privately2 days ago Comments 1 comment Peter Burgess Peter Burgess Founder/CEO at TrueValueMetrics developing Multi Dimension Impact Accounting I started my career in the 1960s. Knowledge has grown in an amazing way since the. More youth around the planet have literacy than at any time in history. These two facts should be the foundation for a fantastic future. Because this is in question, I argue that something is dreadfully wrong. This article goes a long way to explaining the rather poor performance of the modern corporation ... which is arguably the most important engine for progress and performance. I would add another thing ... the singular focus by those that run the conversation on the importance of corporate profit, stock prices and the use of GDP growth as a measure of economic health. These metrics are out of data, and ignore very critical externalities like impact of business performance on people and the various different aspects of the environment. We can do better in the area of metrics. Peter Burgess ... TrueValueMetrics Multi Dimension Impact Accounting Delete Edit Comment 14 minutes left to edit