"In order to generate extraordinary value for shareholders, a company has to learn better than its competitors and apply that knowledge throughout its businesses faster and more widely than they do. The way we see it, anyone in the organization who is not directly accountable for making a profit should be involved in creating and distributing knowledge that the company can use to make a profit."

– John Browne, CEO, BP Amoco

Balanced Organization: 5 Basic Elements

Corporate Capabilities (Water):

• Effective creativity. idea, and knowledge management systems are established... More

Benefits of Knowledge Communities

Knowledge communities organized around the principles of entrepreneurship have the best chance at success. Members of these communities – exciting, entrepreneurial, and highly profitable – would emulate entrepreneurs acting less like followers and more like empowered founders and builders of new organizational value.

Three Steps to Establishing Knowledge Communities

Use entrepreneurial approaches to organize knowledge communities within your organization to give it what it needs most – radical innovation. To establish cross-functional knowledge communities  in your organization from scratch, you may need to go through the following three stages¹:

1. Information sharing – through task forces, cross-departmental activities, e-mail.

2. Cross-departmental Cooperation – through cross-functional teams

3. Knowledge community – a vision of knowledge community has been embraced by the organization; supportive culture and connectivity established

 Case in Point  British Petroleum

British Petroleum has a worldwide reputation for commitment to knowledge management (KM). BP became one of the first few companies to treat knowledge management as a separate discipline when it established a Knowledge Management Team (KMT) in 1997.

In order to integrate the efforts of the business units engaged in the same business activities, they were organized into peer groups.

They met periodically to discuss the performance of their businesses. The purpose of the reorganization was to facilitate knowledge sharing and build synergies, i.e. to exchange knowledge and synergize creative capabilities and expertise of the employees working in different business units of BP. .. More

 Case in Point  GE

General Electric (GE) Work-Out "Town Meetings" gave the corporation access to an unlimited resource of imagination and energy of its talented employees.

"Nobody wears a tie at our quarterly two-days meetings," says Jack Welch." We take a coffee breaks for almost an hour sometimes so people can swap ideas. We bring in an outside speaker to every meeting – the heads of Wal-Mart, Pepsi-Cola, and Compaq. We have dinner together and drinks after eating. We run this place like a family grocery store."²