Page 191 -

174 Chapter 5

• Avoid mistakes
• Leverage best practices
• Reduce time to access talent
• Build reputation
• Take on stewardship for strategic capabilities
Knowledge resides in communities in the form of social capital. The key is often
connecting people to solve problems, to develop new capabilities (learn), to improve
work practices, and to share what is new in the fi eld. The type of knowledge that is
transferred is shared expertise. Unlike formal education and training where public
knowledge is transferred, CoPs provide apprenticing situations over long periods of
time. These need a shared background (context) and shared language in order to share
expertise and will also need to be technology-mediated using e-mail, telephone, group-
ware, videoconferencing. and intranets or Web sites.
Employees today are more often loyal to their profession than they are to a particu-
lar company. In turn, companies are no longer able to afford employment for life —
even in Japan where “ salarymen ” are expected to work at a company for life, layoffs
have occurred. One of the biggest benefi ts of communities of practice is that they help
retain employees. If a knowledge worker is working at an organization where he or
she is able to be an active member of one or more communities of practice, this will
be a signifi cant incentive to stay with that organization. Lesser and Storck (2001)
looked at the relationships that form in these communities and suggested that the
obligations, norms, trust, and identifi cation that come with being a community
member enhances the members ’ ability to share knowledge with and learn from com-
munity participants. The community also serves as a powerful tool to welcome new
members into the organization. New employees can quickly “ plug in ” to the network,
connect, get help, pick up the organizational culture, and quickly develop a sense of
identity and belonging.
Another key benefi t of communities lies in the now popular notion of “ six degrees
of separation ” where every person can be linked to another by six links (Watts 1999).
This stems from the famous 1967 experiment by Milgram (1967) where he asked 160
people in Kansas and Nebraska to each direct a letter to a particular person in
Massachusetts by sending it to an acquaintance whom they thought might be able
to forward it to the target. To Milgram ’ s surprise, 42 letters eventually arrived after
an average of only 5.5 hops. Networks are powerful conduits for the sharing of
knowledge — powerful in terms of the reach of the network and the speed with which
knowledge can be exchanged but also powerful in that content is not merely conveyed