Sharing Hidden Know-How

To manage business operations - let alone innovate - amid frequent restructurings, outsourcings and retirements, leaders must quickly capitalize on hidden know-how (knowledge). That is, know-how that lives inside their organizations or networks - in the teams, processes and experts that comprise them. Yet, many organizations are coming up short in this race. Knowledge sharing and transfer have been reduced to reports, e-mails and tweets replacing vital personal interaction. The lack of meaningful conversation coupled with intense fragmentation across organizations and networks has left leaders floating in a sea of information and ideas without a map to channel insight into action. Sharing Hidden Know-How starts the conversation that allows organizations to take what they know to the bank. The "how-to"/"how-act" guidebook unveils Knowledge Jam, a facilitated collaborative method for helping organizations rediscover the fundamental discipline of knowledge transfer - the conversation. Developed by Katrina Pugh, president of AlignConsulting, the proven process uses human interaction to capture unwritten insights, and more importantly to put them to work. Offering a step-by-step process and practical tools, Sharing Hidden Know-How will help any organization harness untapped knowledge to solve today's thorny problems: * Accelerating New Product Development and Market and Segment Innovations * Maximizing Combined Knowledge in Mergers Integrations, Restructurings, Off-shoring and Outsourcing * Overcoming Information Overload (Focus on Social Media) * Smoothing Executive Transitions and Succession Planning * Smoothing Team Transitions * Spreading Insight across Geographies and Network Partners * Tapping into Sales Insights The next generation of leadership effectiveness is about conversation and reflective facilitation, not just texts and tweets. Sharing Hidden Know-How makes the case for intentional, conversation-based leadership, and provides the practice model to pull it off. Viewed from above, this important book is itself a conversation between Kate Pugh's basic propositions and those of a diverse group of other thinkers, all woven into a unified whole. Viewed on the ground, it is an intellectual joyride, coherent, insightful, promisingly pragmatic, and with just the right measure of the personal to fully reveal a fruitful mind in motion. -- David Kantor, director, Kantor Institute; author, Reading the Room (Jossey-Bass, 2012) "[This] book addresses one of the time-honored problems in organizations: 'How do you get people with experience, solutions and knowledge to share them effectively with those who need those valuable assets?' Technology, we now know, is not the answer--human discussion is. [Pugh] tells you how to structure and facilitate these important conversations." --Thomas H. Davenport, President's distinguished professor of IT and Management, Babson College; author of Analytics at Work and Thinking for a Living. "In this innovative and useful book Kate Pugh shows how you can be a far better knowledge practitioner just by releasing the power of talking in your organization. A fine example of the new generation of knowledge books." --Larry Prusak, author, Working Knowledge; visiting scholar, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California; and senior knowledge advisor to World Bank and NASA "[This book] meets an urgent need within leadership practices: an effective conversational process for capturing and transferring deep smarts." --Stephen Denning, author, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management and The Secret Language of Leadership "Leaders have long known that the 'know-how' of experienced teams is key to their organizations' ability to achieve strategic goals. The challenge has always been to distill this wisdom and deploy it in a way that maximizes and accelerates its impact on organizational effectiveness. [This book] provides a practical approach to addressing this challenge, and, in so doing, improves competitiveness." --Paul Lucidi, chief information officer, Insulet Corporation "A fantastic replacement for the long dormant and never used lessons-learned repository! This book provides well documented and effective tools for really learning from your organization. As our business continues to go through transformational change, I hope to make good use of the Knowledge Jam to make that transformation efficient." --Sheryl Skifstad, senior director, Supply Chain IT at a Fortune 100 company