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332 Chapter 9

Some companies such as Buckman Labs, 3M, Kao in Japan, AES, and others have
managed to strike the right balance ( Klein 1999 ). Some of their critical success factors
were:

• Consistency between core values, business strategy, and actual work environment
• Stress placed on personal freedom, cooperation, and community
• Top leaders serve as good role models — they “ walk the talk ”
AES set up a task force to conduct a historical study of the company ’ s ten biggest
mistakes. They also provided physical meeting space and time for people from differ-
ent parts of the company to meet and share what they were doing, and to get advice
on problems.
3M incorporated stories into their corporate training. 3M adopted the slogan “ con-
servatism with creativity ” and the company realized that 30 percent of revenues come
from products that are less than four years old. Technology was used to connect
knowledge workers to a database so they could share their expertise syste matically.
The 15 percent rule was used: 15 percent of each employee ’ s time should be set aside
to pursue personal research interests. 3M also instituted a storytelling culture with
such chestnuts as “ remember the time they tried to kill the Thinsulate idea. . . ” ).
KAO is a company that focused on organizational learning and based its approach
on values derived from Buddhist principles. Continuous cross-functional interactions
were encouraged and every meeting at KAO is open to all. The value-added network
(VAN) is KAO ’ s digital memory. ECHO is a system that adds customer call information
to VAN and they can receive about 250 calls per day. In this way, corporate experi-
ences are preserved and made available for future customer interactions.
Buckman Labs developed K ’ Netix as their knowledge network. This knowledge
repository is available in the ninety countries where Buckman has its offi ces. The users
are both the sales and technical workforce. K ’ Netix connects the Buckman CoPs. The
KM application consists of e-mail and forums residing in the knowledge repositories.
Each forum has a message bulletin board, library, and virtual conference room. In
confi guring for a balanced knowledge framework, successful companies such as these
need to identify strategic business drivers: What is the business all about? This is the
logical starting point to decide how to organize and manage intellectual assets. They
need to identify products, services, cost, value, quality, and differentiating factors, and
they need to characterize the environment in terms of competitive forces, regulations,
and socioeconomic trends. The organization can then establish the knowledge core
and interrelationships: What are the knowledge assets needed to maximize value
for customers, shareholders, employees, and other stakeholders? Both tangible and
intangible assets (e.g., values, culture, people, technology, business capabilities) need