For leaders, the flow of information within their company ought to be a primary concern. The need for developing horizonal information flow is critical as is the avoidence of allowing islands of information to develop leading to fragmented knowledge. In virtual and decentralised structures gettos of information develop all to easily. Getting this information out to the wider network becomes critical especially when it comes to…
the ability of the company to learn. Exploiting the benefits of corporate learning are dependant on the transference, sharing and leverage of information. In The Individualized Corporation (buy it at Amazon.com or Kalahari.net), Ghoshal and Bartlett state that, “building employee development into the ongoing routine of corporate life usually contributes to learning in ways companies do not anticipate…By forcing partners to take on the role of professors, they (the McKinsay partners) began to articulate and document knowledge that had long been tacit. Equally important was the impact on the participants who not only learnt about new tools, models, and frameworks but also developed the contacts and relationships that became a vital pert of the firm’s ability to develop and diffuse knowledge rapidly around the world” (p82).
In TomorrowToday.biz blogging is a significant tool to accomplish this. But then again this is an environment where information is shared and the glass edifices of transparency repeatedly cleaned. It would be more difficult in environment where this isn’t the case but that is the challenge inherent in an emerging Connection economy. Leaders will need to rethink and possibly redefine their approach to information (un)management and organisational learning. Certainly blogging is one way to take a step in the right direction.
Of course the big advantage that Blogging provides that we’ve not seen on this scale, is that blogging allows people not only access to information, but opportunity to interact and engage with it. It provides an effective forum that can be monitored, tracked, remembered, built on, continued, etc that’s not been around before.
The concept of ‘democratising information’ has been talked of for a long time, but passing out information is really innefective if people cannot engage it, internalise it, and then learn from ‘putting it out there’.
Blogging then, does what your quote suggests, it forces people to take on the role of professors as they use the blog environment to not only articulate and document, but to engage as well.
From one professor to another then, blog on.
Nuf sed