“Have any of you had the charming experience of trying to manage a birthday party for eleven-year-old boys?” I’ve done this. I mean, there is a lot of ways that you can go about it. But if you try a top-down strong-control approach, it doesn’t work. But you can see what boys naturally will do, if you give them a little tools, a little time, a little space, a little light overseeing. Light overseeing works reasonably well. 
  The same thing works in organizations, in connectivity and community. A light touch is essential. That heavy hand: “We now have 93 people in this community. You’re supposed to do this every hour.” It doesn’t work! I’ve seen it.
   In IBM, I do not have anything to do with IBM’s internal knowledge management. practice. For the simple reason, no man is a hero in his own company, in his own agency. 

Finding who knows what

   So connectivity is really important. People self-organize. How do they find each other? They do. How do kids find each other? How do you find partners in life? We find each other. Stories. Shared passions. Some lizard-brain type of activity where you find people who share likes and dislikes… This stuff is real. That’s how we find each other. We find each other, and people find each other in organizations. 
I would certainly agree with the previous speaker when she said that the transaction cost of finding people, when you don’t know them, is very high. And it’s terrible. And it costs firms money. 
   About two months ago, I got a phone call from a very senior person in a big, big company in Japan, and he asked me whether I’d be interested in doing something. That company has a large IBM client team in place to help sell IBM products. No doubt about it. But I can’t find those people. I don’t know who they are, and I can’t spend the time, because it will take me three to four hours. I don’t have that time to waste, so I don’t tell IBM’s client team. I would. I’m a good corporate citizen. I would do it if it wasn’t hard to do. But all of us are intendedly rational. Most people come to work to do a good job. They are rational by their own lights. For me to spend three to four hours doing something like that, rather than working with clients, doing creative stuff, is death. I’m not going to do it. So they lose an opportunity. This story can be multiplied in IBM, probably by the thousands, and in any large organization, no one knows what anyone else knows, they can’t find them, and they miss opportunities. That is exactly what the previous speaker talked about.  It’s both information question.and a knowledge question. It’s an information question to find the person, but when you find the person, it becomes a knowledge question. That’s something we could talk about later. So that’s connectivity and community.

Communities

    One of the great achievements of the knowledge movement was to get the fact acknowledged that human beings individually, in organizations, is not the unit of analysis for knowledge. This is a big step forward. And it goes against Microsoft and IBM and firms that try to push that individualistic viewpoint, because they are selling individualized technology. They think that’s the right unit. They’re wrong. The right unit for managing knowledge in organizations is the group. It’s not an individual. Individuals don’t do much. The smartest ones don’t. The stupidest ones don’t. They group together and form a common mean.