 Quiet, quiet, sleep, sleep, quiet. I'm going to try to talk about some new or innovative knowledge management methods and tools that haven't been mentioned much so far. I don't need to go into. Can you hear me? Is that all right? Is it too close? This is an echo, right? We'll see. It's too high up. You have to come here and show me what you've been talking about. Thank you. Did you hear what they said? Oh, here it is. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a problem. This is against all of that. Thank you. Please. Now I understand. Now I see that you worked for us at home. You know a little bit. A little bit. Yeah, not too much. A little bit. OK, thank you. So I'm going to talk about tools that haven't been mentioned before. And you might find this useful. Knowledge management is only, as a systematic discipline, maybe 25 or 30 years old. So there's constant development of tools and methods. Some are made up by consultants to make money. Others are made up by scholars or a little ethereal. But quite a few of them are actual real. Ron gave a perfect example of one yesterday of critical knowledge asset management. That's a perfect example. And I'm not going to talk too much about culture because you've already heard a lot about it. But I'll try to talk about some things that maybe we haven't talked about too much. Let's start with one that's quite interesting and quite causing quite a stir. Cognitive diversity. Cognitive diversity. I hope this word translates because I can't say in other languages. Cognitive, the diversity of thinking in terms of a better outcome. In the United States, and probably quite a few of the other countries represented here, there's a big movement to have diversity. And when people talk about that, they usually mean gender diversity or ethnic diversity or people of different backgrounds, colors, races working together. I'm not against that. That's a fine idea. It does not guarantee a better outcome. It might be the right thing to do, it probably is, but it doesn't mean a better outcome. I'm old enough to remember when my wife and relatives said, if we only had women prime ministers or presidents, the world would be a better place. And I'm sure it can give you many examples lately of women who would not make the world a better place. It doesn't guarantee anything. However, a number of people began to talk about diversity of mental models and mental tools. Let me explain what I mean by that, what these researchers talk about that. There's a great word in French, bricolure, sort of like a handyman. There are people who are very good at doing different things around your house that you can't do. And they do a number of these things. Those people bring a toolkit. You know, your cellar, your basement has water, the roof leaks, they bring a kit, the toolbox. We all bring toolboxes to the task we do. We all have mental toolboxes. We approach a problem, a task with this toolbox. Those toolboxes generally are formed when we go to university, our first jobs, our parents, but most often practical training. If you go to law school, you get a toolbox full of law, how to understand laws, how to argue in court, what to do with clients, it's a toolbox. If you're an engineer, which quite a few of you are, you get an engineering toolbox. You may have other interests, you may like poetry or music, but basically you approach a problem as an engineer. So we all have these toolboxes. When we design organizations or try to design teams, usually we put the people with the same toolbox into solve that problem. This is a limited of limited value. It turns out that you don't get the best outcome that way. A person who taught me a lot about knowledge, Girononaka, a great Japanese sensei, great scholar, he talked about how Honda, the automobile, very successful automobile company, they wanted to design the car of the future. And like most organizations, they gave it to research and development, do a prototype, then they gave it to marketing. How would we sell this car? Then they gave it to operations. How would we build this car? Step by step by step by step, a very linear way where all the people in those organizations, R&D, marketing, have the same toolbox. They got the same degrees, especially. They know the same things. Honda decided to do something different and they forced three of those groups to come up with one model. They forced them to work together. And they all had the interests of the firm at first, but they have different toolboxes. And there was some fighting, some arguing, some problems, but they developed a great car, much better than they would have in a linear model. If you hire a, I worked as a management consultant for many years. If you hire a management consulting firm, let's say McKinsey, it's a big firm, I was there for seven years, they'll send you 10 people with MBA degrees, management and business arts, 10 degrees. And they'll try to solve your problem. And after two months they'll say, we can't solve it, we need 10 more people. But the 10 new people know the same thing as the first 10. Why would you get any improvement? You just get more bodies and more energy, but you're not gonna get innovation. You're not gonna get a different model. Lawyers do this, consultant, everyone does this. What would happen if you tried putting people who love the subject but have different toolboxes? One of the whole reasons we have a discipline of knowledge management, frankly, is because a number of us who started this subject, Ron, myself, quite came with very different toolboxes. I have a PhD in the history of ideas, for example. My friend Tom Davenport, who I wrote that book with, had a PhD in sociology of technology. I can give you many examples of this. The best one I know of, I'm gonna tell you a story because it's the only way people learn anyways through stories. So when I was working for McKinsey, they had a big project with the Volvo company, Automobile in Sweden. And they told me, go help this team. Go join the Volvo team in Stockholm. Nice city, I'm happy to go to Stockholm. Went there, I got there over the weekend a little earlier. So I asked the hotel if other people were available for my team to have dinner with. There was one man who was available, an Indian fellow. So I said, would you like to have dinner? We had dinner together. He's quite a bit younger than me. So I started the conversation the way you would say, where did you go to school? And he said, I went to Oxford University. What did you study? And he said, well, I wrote a dissertation on the mathematical structure of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. And I waited for the next sentence, which was going to be, I thought, well, I couldn't make any money doing that. So I got an MBA and became a consultant, but he didn't say anything. He just looked at me. And I said, and you're working on a team of global sourcing for Volvo. He goes, that's right. And this is like a little game he was playing. I said, well, okay. Are you going to supply the background music, this lovely music of Bach while we talk? What do you do here? Well, they hired me because they saw that I was very good at understanding the patterns of very complex situations. Bach's music is very complex. And if you see the pattern, I thought that was a great answer. McKinsey had taken upon themselves the idea that they were tired of just hiring MBAs from five schools. That's what they used to do. I didn't have one, by the way. I was an exception, but five schools, MBAs. And everyone knew the same thing. It didn't matter if they were men or women, if they were black or white or yellow or whatever color, they knew the same. They came with a scheme toolbox. They went to Oxford, they went to Harvard, they went to Stanford, and they brought the same toolbox. So they hired this fellow who had a PhD in musicology. He was terrific. I worked with him, he was great. You could imagine how complex it is for a company like Volvo to source the resources to build a car, zillions of suppliers, types of materials. This guy could look at it and understand, what about this, what about this? Cognitive diversity. It's a really useful subject. Don't always hire the same people. I've tried to convince NASA, who I've worked with pretty closely for 20 years, to do things like this. And they're starting to move away. They're beginning to hire social scientists besides engineers and aerospace engineers. It's a long slot because your nature, like, likes, like. It's hard to say that in other language. People are homophilic. They like being with people like themselves. So if you have 10 MBAs, they want another 10 MBAs. They don't want sociologists, anthropologists, nuclear physicists, string theorists. They don't want these people. But that's the way to get better outcomes. There's a, if any of you are interested in asking me, there's some wonderful new books on this subject. A man named Scott Page, PAG, has a brand new book out called The Hidden Bonus, Diversity and Teamwork, published by Princeton in the United States. So that's a new development, in terms of better knowledge structure, building new knowledge, not always having the same sort of people around. I think it's the way of the future. You'll see more and more of that as time goes on. Let me tell you another subject that's also hot. Space, the final frontier. Spaces are something we neglected when we first started to talk about knowledge. In fact, there was a lot of pressure, again, from vendors, commercial interests, saying distance is gone, it doesn't matter physically where you are. This is completely wrong and made up by people to sell you stuff. Space means a great deal. What do I mean by this? Again, I'll tell you a story, a true story, I was actually involved in. Do you know there's a drug firm called Novartis? Are you familiar with Novartis? Big pharmaceutical firm in Switzerland. So I was doing some consulting for them on knowledge type of issues, and they told me they were gonna build a brand new research and development center in the United States, and they were looking at places to do it in. Oh good, that's wonderful. And this man told me, we are being besieged by governors of the state, saying you'll never pay taxes if you come to our state. We'll pay your taxes, we'll pay you millions of dollars because they want the jobs that a big R&D center would provide. It's 7,000 people would be working there. Had all these odd places in the United States, places most people don't wanna work, they were offering them everything under the sun. They chose, for their R&D center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, near where I live, maybe the most expensive real estate in the United States, if not number one, number two, and they didn't know, no tax breaks at all. The mayor of Cambridge said, good, come here, we'll tax you unmercifully. So why did they pick Cambridge? These are Swiss people. The Swiss love money. They don't wanna spend money, and they picked very expensive real estate. Why did they go to Cambridge, Massachusetts? It's not that pretty. Some prestige, that's a good answer, but there's a better one. Pardon? Quality of the people based on what? That's a good answer. What is in Cambridge, Mass? I don't expect you to know all that. Harvard and MIT and Boston University and Emerson College and Boston College. There's a tremendous amount of intellectual capital produced in that town, maybe more than, well, certainly in the top three or four in the world. And all MIT in particular has a tremendous programs in genetic medicine. There also are over 400 genetic, genome medicine organizations in the Boston area. Knowledge is in the air. A great economist, Alfred Marshall said this in the late 19th century, and he was right. Companies like being where other companies are because the knowledge gets out, it's in the air. So they picked a location that was absolutely sent equidistant. The same distance from MIT as it is at Harvard. It was a candy factory. And it cost them a fortune. Very expensive and they pay high taxes. Well worth it. They call up, they visit the professors in these universities. They talk to other people in the industry. Knowledge is in there. Why do companies do that? Why are they all in Silicon Valley? Why don't they go to North Dakota or Mississippi? One, they couldn't get people to work there, people that they want. But even if they could, there's no other firms like that. You'd be isolated. This is why companies clump with each other. Space is really important, and we pay for space. Real estate, I live in a very highly taxed town outside of Boston, Lexington, Massachusetts. There are towns nearby that have much lower taxes. And for the same amount of money, you can get a house there. But people don't want to live there. They like living in Lexington because there's a lot of people like me in Lexington, a lot of consultants and academics. They like being with one another. Some of it's reputation, some of it's status, but mostly people like talking to other people who do what they do. Human beings, birds of a feather flock together. It's been true forever. Tribalism and so forth. That's one sort of space. Another sort of space that's very important for knowledge, and there was a big controversy about this in the US not long ago, was working at home or working together. I was with IBM, and they were pushing companies, you don't need offices, you could save a fortune in real estate, let everyone work at home. They pushed and pushed us on their clients. Technology solves this, you don't have to show up. So I was interviewed by a newspaper about this and I said, that's made up. I said, there were 2,000 executives at IBM. I was one myself. I said, if you show me one who got to be an executive by staying home, I'll retract my statement. Find one. No one. No one gets anywhere from staying home, folks. Not in organizations, not in this world. Not only that, you don't learn anything except you learn what's in your office. You know what's on the screen. Someone earlier shook or my friend, he was talking about culture. People learn live, they learn from one another. They get the emotions, the stories. They do not learn from the screens. I heard one time the chairman of IBM tell a reporter, I know what happens at IBM. All he knew was his office and what people told him and what they told him was mostly what he wanted to hear. Very few people. And that's true for government rulers. If you don't leave your office, if you don't go anywhere, you're not gonna learn anything except what you already know. And that's absolutely true. You can, there's been some wonderful studies about how much people travel to go to conferences, to learn at different universities. Just what we're doing here, exactly this. How much more they know, how much better their quality of their knowledge is because they get out of their office. They get out of their office. Space. You have to move around. If you stay in your office, all you'll know is your office. If you stay at home, you'll get to know your dog better or maybe your children. But it's not gonna help you very much learn new things unless you really, the dog knows a lot. You can learn from the dog or cat. Even the construction of offices. About 20 years ago, the Harvard Business School, which I've taught at and know people, a lot of people there, they always get a lot of money. They have an enormous amount of money and they always get it. They built a new office building for their more prestigious professors. Beautiful building, lovely design. There wasn't one inch in that building that wasn't private offices. So what they're saying is knowledge, you're in your own office. There was no space for conversation. There was no space for meeting people. It was the exact wrong model for generating knowledge. And that was Harvard. It's a good argument for not listening to professors from business schools, I'll tell you. Follow practice, not professors. That's probably a good idea in spite of some of us. It's just like we cannot meet like that every day. That's true. No, you can't go to conferences every day. But if you meet once or twice a year again as one of the other speakers said, you build networks of trust. You build knowledge networks. So you're absolutely right. But you need to meet at least once or twice a year. Otherwise entropy occurs. You lose energy at the edges. It goes up and then you die. So you need to meet to get the energy generated. But you're right. But if you're in an office, you can leave your office. You could talk to other people. I mean, think about that. You have to get out. You have to travel. One of the reasons the United States has such dreadful politics and stupid ideas because only one-fifth of the people in the United States have passports. Yeah, George W. Bush, the former president had only left the country twice. And it was to see his daughter when she was in school in Rome. So people have crazy ideas about Russia, about health care and framing, stuff that makes no sense at all if you ever went to these countries. But they don't leave, so they don't know anything. That's why it makes Europe a little more advanced because you can easily get to other countries. The U.S., even Canada, which has different politics, people don't even go there much. It's too cold. But even within offices, there are now people called knowledge architects. I actually spoke to a whole conference of them in San Francisco. People who design office space with the ideas of serendipity. There's a good word for you. Do you know what serendipity means? You discover something by accident that's good. Serendip was the old name for the country that's now Sri Lanka. And someone wrote a book in the 16th century about the princess of serendip who found lovely things by wandering around. So the word entered the English language. You can design space in such a way that people meet each other. It's a great case, a business case from Denmark about this. There's a Danish hearing aid company called Otacom. And it was in a big warehouse in Copenhagen. They redesigned the warehouse. But every floor, there was no elevator. It was eight stories high. So people are always the Danes are healthy. They walk up and down. And the owner of this firm, he was a family firm, noticed that when people met one another on the stairwell, they'd stop and talk. Hey, what are you working on? How are you doing? But it was cold in the stairwell. There were no chairs. There's nothing. It's a stairwell, wasn't that lovely? He then redesigned the building and put couches, fruit, candy, and coffee machines in the stairwell. It was a symbol, a signal. Stay here, talk. You'll learn something new. Even if you're talking about sports or you're talking about Denmark politics, you'll design networks. Pretty good idea. Spaces are really important. Don't be taken in by commercial arguments that some idiot wrote a book that Harvard Public called The Death of Distance. It's completely, a lot of ideas that come out of, again, really made their ideas designed to make money for the author, not to help you in any way. So, here's another thing we're beginning to learn. Fascinating subject. One or two of you, the speakers, mentioned trust. Very interesting subject. About 15 years ago, I got very interested. Sorry. Area offices where everyone just has a desk. No, I think you need mixed. I would say, and this is very debatable, so it depends on the subject. I would say mixed. Have some private offices and some public spaces. And encourage people to get out. But of course you need to make phone calls or talk to people privately, even for business reasons or to get the quiet. You need both. I'd say mixed would be the best answer. Well, if there was a tea room, I have to get, I'm sorry, I like telling stories. I'll tell you a great one about my friend Nonaka, who's a great guru in this subject. So he's a very well-known management theorist in Japan. And about seven years ago, the Canon Corporation, are you familiar with Canon? They were, their sales weren't doing so well. Things weren't going so well for them. So they called Nonaka in. He's a little guy, very unassuming. And the chairman said, can you help us, our sales aren't doing so well? Maybe come up with some ideas for us. So Jiro, he talked to the chief, the executives there, he went around, just talked to people. And he came back a week later, the true story. And he met with the chairman and the chairman said, what do you suggest? And Nonaka said, drink more tea. Now Japan has a very, very polite culture. I'd say it's the most polite culture country in the world. I mean, I can't imagine a more polite place. So the guy didn't say, drink more. Are you crazy? He threw him out. I said, would you kindly say a little bit more? And what he'd said was that the executives, the head of marketing, the head of operations, the usual, they were so busy, they'd come to work and go right into their office working. And he said, every morning, have them meet for half an hour and drink some tea and talk with one another. They did it, he said. For now on, everyone has to meet for half an hour and have tea together. Sales went up, it worked. They weren't talking to one. I can give you about a hundred examples like things like this. People are so busy, they're so up to here, they don't talk to one another. And this is a disaster for organizations. It's an absolute disaster. It's a disaster for politics and for countries too. And we don't have time to talk about that. Let's talk a little about trust. So 15 years ago, I was writing a book on social capital. And I got interested in trust, which is an element of social capital means the returns to you or your organization or to your country by who you know and who you work with. The returns to social, you know, the old saying again, maybe it's just in English, but it's not what you know, it's who you know. Sadly, this is fairly true. But my life experience. So what are the returns? Well, what are the elements of social capitalist trust? So I went out and tried to read about trust, books by social scientists and others. There was almost nothing. Today, I personally own at least 25 books on this subject. And there are many more. I just don't want to buy, I've already read a lot about it. Why is trust so important? Nothing much happens in knowledge without trust. And that's true for countries and it's true for societies and it's true for organizations. Why is trust so important? Well, you know, most of transactions in organizations are what's the capital of France or what's the GMP of Libya or what's Canon doing versus Xerox? They're transactional sort of questions, factual questions. Fine, you need them to get along. But if you really want to transfer knowledge, why did that jerk get promoted and not me? What's our competitor really doing? I know your brother-in-law works for a competing firm. What do you hear? That requires trust. If you don't trust someone, you're not going to really share with them things that might be difficult if everyone knew about it. But trust is a slippery subject. Can you just make trust happen? How do you build trust? How do you destroy trust? These are very interesting. A lot of people have been working on this lately. Here are some things about trust in relation to knowledge. Trust is asymmetrical. It's easy to form trust and you can have it for 20 years. You could trust someone, but you break the trust, it goes. This is the basis of divorce. A lot of people are married for a certain amount of time and then they do something to one another. And even though they've been happy for 20 years, they can get divorced. The marriage isn't working. And that's true for feelings about organizations. So it's asymmetrical. You can have long strings of it, but you could lose it like this. Trust is also not just trust between workers. There's different levels of trust. Ashok's going to talk about the World Bank, where also I worked for quite a while. We did some big surveys at the World Bank and people trusted their colleagues very much. They trust their colleagues because they could see their activities. They're reliable. If you would trust people who you work closely with because you see what they do, no one trusted management. One, they didn't see what they did and basically they thought management lied to them all the time, which was true. Many organizations, that's the case. People don't trust the higher ups, they trust their colleagues. This is not a great thing. It's not so wonderful. But because of, and again, we don't have time to go into this, because of sometimes the structure of organizations, the hierarchical nature of organizations, the need for public companies to report to the capital market. So they have to lie all the time to get Wall Street, the various forms of Wall Street, to endorse the stocks. They're just not truthful people. The other thing that happens is, and this is something no one's mentioned yet, but it's really a big deal. If you wanna have certain values in organizations, you know what the biggest signal is for workers to understand what values the organization has? What's number one? Pardon? Top-level management demonstrating these values. Right, how do they demonstrate that? That's exactly right, Monica. How do they demonstrate the values? What's the most visible sign? Who gets promoted? If you promote scoundrels, even though you say we're wonderful people, you promote scoundrels, what do you think the lesson is for the workers? Be a scoundrel, that's how you get ahead. This happens every damn week in the United States. We had the big bank, Wells Fargo, and they have the senior management who promoted the worst people in the world, who were thieves. They really were. One of the senators, Elizabeth Warren, she told this guy, the head of Wells Fargo, right on television, you're a thief, you should be in jail. No one's ever said anything like that. So they threw him out, but he threw him out with $70 million as a leaving bonus. What sort of people do you think Wells Fargo hired? They look up, ah, that's who they bat. This is true for all, that's an extreme case. But if you hire bad people, everyone gets that lesson. I worked for Ernst & Young, a big accounting consultant firm at one point in my life, and there was a consultant in the Boston area they wanted to hire. So they asked me and a bunch of people, should we hire this person? And we go, no, he's a terrible liar. He's not an honest person, he's awful. But he had some big clients. He had some business relationships. They brought in a lot of money. And they hired him, and I was furious. He says, why did you hire this guy? I said, would you hire Hitler or Stalin? And he said, if they had a lot of clients, I would. Ernst & Young Consulting doesn't exist anymore. They want out of business. Yeah, they rebuild, they want out of business. These people had no values but money. And it's a bad way to work because it doesn't pay. It's contradictory, but it doesn't work well. Trust is really important. Hire people who are perceived as being trustworthy. Endow people with trustworthiness. I'll give you one more story, and I don't want to talk about one or two other things. So I worked for IBM at a research lab. Had 40 people reporting to me. IBM was a deeply bureaucratic organization. It reminded me a little of the UN in some ways. So these people worked for me, and I had to look at all their expense reports every week. And these are consultants, they're always traveling. And these were big expense reports, yeah? Supposed to look at all that they stay at this hotel or that hotel, did they fly business class or coach. Had I done that, that's all I would be doing. They would pay me a lot of money, they recruited me. I don't want to just read expense reports, I'd rather be dead. I mean, who the hell wants to do that? You see, I have to do that. You didn't, you stopped at a Marriott. You're supposed to stay at a Hyatt. You flew business class to Boise, Idaho. You're supposed to go coach. So I called all the 40 of them in for a meeting. And I said, I am never gonna read your expense reports. Never, I'm gonna blanketly approve them. I trust you. If you break my trust, if you get me in trouble by staying at a five-star hotel or going first class, all right, I'll get yelled at, you'll be fired, but I'll never trust you again. Is it worth it? Worked like a charm, I stayed there seven years, I never looked at an expense report again. Telling someone you trust them is like saying I love you. It's very powerful. And it works. Very few people would break the trust. You'd have to be pretty, because it's not a rational decision. Just to stay at a better hotel to lose the trust of. Someone would pick it up, eventually it'd get caught. So entrusting others is a good way to inculcate trust. Trust is also good behavior in organizations migrates. It's contagious, as bad behavior is. That's what I'm talking about, culture. If enough people act badly, everyone will start acting badly. Everyone will catch a cold. If people act honestly and with trust, it spreads, it's contagious. So that's another thing you can learn about, trust. What, what do I have, 10 minutes left? What's something like that for? Let me tell you one more thing now I already asked some questions. I'll ask you for questions. Another new sort of tool we're using in knowledge is knowledge transaction costs. Now I know quite a few of you are fans of measurement. So here's some red meat for the measurement fans. You can, transaction cost economics is a big deal if you study economics. What is a cost to transact business? What are the actual costs of doing business? It's a very serious and complex subject. So I was listening to a lecture on this by, again, a very prominent economist. And I said, what about the cost of transacting knowledge? Is that measurable? Could that be done? And this man is in his Douglas North. He won the Nobel Prize for this. He said, I think so. So I got very interested in this. And again, other people did too. Not just, and we decided to test this out. Can you measure how much it costs in time, effort, money for knowledge to move in an organization to spread around? And it was really, very successful. We did it at NASA, Novartis, a number of other firms I don't think you'd be that familiar with in a few other places. How, you measure people. You ask them to keep a log online. How much time did it take? So let's say you work in research. I'll pick Novartis, because we use the oncology, the cancer drug people in Novartis. If you wanted to know from another person in Novartis in another country, you wanted them to answer a question, not a transaction question, a serious question. How much time will it take before you get the answer you need? So you have to identify the person. You have to negotiate with the person. Maybe follow up. Then get what they have to send you, read it and use it. That's a transaction chain, and you can measure those things. Very, very, we've got some very interesting results on that, it was a very interesting study. And now other people have taken this up. You can measure this. How long does it take to get a satisfactory answer? And it's from people you don't necessarily know. They're not in your networks. If they're in your network, that's the advantage of having networks. People respond quicker. You don't even, you can also have networks of networks who say, I don't know you, but I know your friend. I mean, you can use proxies. But if people outside your network, it takes quite a bit of time, you can shorten that. That was the answer. If you look at long chains of transaction costs, you can short circuit them. You can make them quicker. What Novartis did and what NASA did is put in place systems which identify what people know. Very valuable tool. Very valuable tool. Let people in large dispersed organizations let them know who else knows things. Have them self-identify what they know, what projects they worked on. McKinsey did a really cool thing about this, I have to tell you. What they did is people put in documents that they've written. So if you say, gee, I'd like to know who knows a lot about global sourcing. Not only would people say, I know about it, I got a degree in it, they put in place reports, articles, and documents they've written about it. You can read it and see if they really know anything. And then you can rate them the way Amazon rates books. You know, if you read a book and you can tell Amazon this book was no good, people do that with these reports. So if everyone said, this was a great report, it helped me do my work. You get a lot of, in that case, you'd say, well, what would I want to do that? What do I want to share all this knowledge? One of the other speakers was dead right. No one loses anything by sharing knowledge. You only gain, you gain reputational capital, you gain prestige, and you won't get fired. Don't ever think of not sharing when you can. Believe me, it's a strategy for losers. Share, let, you get known for knowing things. That's a pretty valuable thing. Pretty valuable thing. So of course, if people rate all your stuff as no good, you have a problem. That's another problem we have five minutes left. Sorry, this is obviously, we could talk about this for a long time, but why don't I stop here and ask, if any of you have any comments or questions you'd like to ask about? And there are things I've said or anything I haven't said. It's a lot of stuff I know, but it's, just speak up. If you don't, I'll keep talking, but no. In the last example that you gave with McKenzie, where people self-identified and people could go and kind of rate it, did they have any type of quality check? No, and it's a good idea. I mean, let's just say, I had a fill this up. I told people, I was an expert in Hindu information systems of the 16th century, and I was full of it. I was just making it up. It would get known pretty quickly, this guy's a joker. You wouldn't want to lie about it because you'll get caught out right away. And they hire people, they're very careful who they hire. It's a good idea, by the way, to really be careful who you hire. That's the part of the most useful thing you could do as a manager. But no, people didn't lie about it because it just gets shown up right away. It's like these dating services. My sister-in-law was looking for a new husband, and men would say they're taller than they are. Well, what's the point? The minute you see them, you say, actually, this guy's full of it. So it's a similar sort of thing. Anyone else? Of course. I don't feel a philosophical question, thank you. I like philosophical questions. Sharing information, sharing knowledge. Also, keep sharing knowledge to the persons who are not trustworthy. Well, that's true, you can do that. And what they'll do is say, oh, it's my knowledge. I didn't get it from you. Overall, it's still worth doing. Yeah, there are people, that happens all the time. I went to a conference once. I won't say who it is, but you know who I'm there talking about. Where I saw an idea I had presented at the conference by another person who said it was his idea. I was right there. And I sort of laughed at it. Those things happen. There are worse crimes in the world. Thanks. Now, many organizations, institutions, including I guess the IAEA and the ICTP here, use social networks to share knowledge. So I think that there are positive and also negative effects of this kind of new tool for sharing knowledge. I would like to know your thinking. Well, you're right. I mean, it's very expedient and efficient to share things within your own social network. I do it all the time, all of us do that. It makes it quicker and easier if I send, you know. On the other hand, you miss out on people who are not in your network. So it's sort of a win and a loss at the same time. There's no universal good in these things. It's just a judgment call. But most people, social networks are real. That's one of the most valuable tools we have in knowledge management, is social network analysis. That really works. It's cheap and it works. And it shows people who are not part of any network. So you want to get them in. People use that to sort of nudge people, to counsel them. Hey, how come no one of you never talked to anyone, you know? And it's a valuable tool. But again, it's like any other tool. You talk to other physicists, you know, rather than talking to anthropologists. Well, you probably do for what you said. But in general, yeah, it's a win or a loss. Our brains are limited, you know. What does someone use that word, absorbed of capacity? You can only absorb so much, so you tend to absorb from people you trust or people you know, or people you know know things. But it's limited because of that also. Life is short. Yeah, also the negative is that in this infosphere related to the digital network, obviously more and more we are creating a kind of protection around the individual. You can protect yourself, you know, you can shield yourself, I would say. Yes. And that happens even with Google. Well, you know that Google, by using Google, Google understand who you are and what you need. Anyway, it's not really helping you. It's creating a shield around yourself with some specific information that another person would not have, for example. And the same happens also, I think, in Facebook and in other social networks. So that, I don't know in the long term what that will produce, but it's not very good. I mean, and for sure it's very different because you can also have a different personality protected also by these spheres. So, you know, first of all, you don't have the chemistry and all the rest that your body that you develop in many thousands of years can help in the interpersonal communication. But there is this additional factor that is creating some damage. You're absolutely right. I completely agree with everything you said. That's true. People shield themselves by going to certain universities by joining certain associations. We all create shields which protect us and you get perceived by the shield you have. It's a very useful point though. That's true. It's an open issue, you might say, an open question. I think a fellow that wanted to take one or two other questions. Yes, thank you very much, sir. Just like you said, our brains can only absorb so much. So I don't know if most of what you said, if we can have some materials on it after this presentation or if you can guide us to information where we can get some information on what you've talked about. You have the lecture. Yeah, unfortunately, in the interest of spontaneity and the fact that I don't really write a lot of this down. I just say it. So you have to listen carefully. But you have the recorded lectures. You could often write to me if there's something specific you want to do. That's fine. Feel free to write. I try to answer almost everything I get. So it's true. Okay, I think that's, we have one more question. Okay. Thanks. I want to ask how to build trust in a very competitive organization? Frankly, you just can't. Just can't. No, I remember talking, yeah, I have a close childhood friend who became a fairly reasonably high executive at one of the Wall Street firms. And he invited me for lunch and he asked me what I was doing. And I said, do you ever want me to work here? Do anything for you? He says, oh no, no one gives a damn about knowledge or trust. We're just like animals in a pit. And they are. People who go to the certain types of organizations, they don't want to cooperate. They don't want to be trustful. They're like animals in a kennel who just are fighting. Even dogs actually are more trustworthy. But that's what they do. That's who they are. Don't waste your time trying to convert people. Believe me, it's nothing like an organization like this. This is the opposite. There are many organizations that don't care about this stuff at all. And they don't care about knowledge even. Really? Okay, that's it. Thank you very much.