 Okay, can you hear me? Please feel free to make questions. Yeah. Please feel free to tell us if you are speaking to us. Feel free to stop us if you need. I tend to talk quickly because I was brought up in New York City in a really tough neighborhood. So as a little boy I had to either fight or talk fast. You can guess which one I chose. I'm going to be, it's an interesting beginning for this entire session because I'm going to be talking about networks and intellectual movements and things that we just addressed. This is an interesting group. I am not a scientist and knowledge is not a scientific discipline. I am not an engineer and knowledge is not an engineering discipline. This is a social science, something quite different. So you have to move away from Paul Dirac and Ramanujan and think about the more social aspects of knowledge and work. I'm going to also be talking to you about what we call practical knowledge or useful knowledge. Historians of knowledge use those two words. There are many different types of knowledge. Some of you come from areas, you'll know very well what I'm talking about. Poetry, art, philosophy, music. They're all forms of knowledge. One is not better than the other. But when we talk today and through this week most likely, we're going to be talking about practical knowledge, useful knowledge which is more, again, science, engineering, management. The type of knowledge that allows you to do things. More knowledge as capability. Not that you don't need other types of knowledge to live in this world. You do. But for all purposes we're just going to talk about that type of knowledge. Human beings are actually well structured to work with knowledge and you wouldn't have cultures, you wouldn't have civilizations without knowledge which is people passing on to others what they knew, what they know. We've only had written language for a short period of time but humans themselves have done things. We have the brains and evolutionary capacity to do things. So why is knowledge management a new subject? I was talking to my colleagues. This is a brand new subject that's maybe 30 years old. I'm old enough I was there at the beginning of it, trust me. It didn't exist before a bunch of us tried to think about this. If we've had knowledge since the beginning of human beings, homo sapiens, maybe even the Neanderthals had it as possible. Well I think they built tools actually, I'm pretty sure they did. So what happened? How did we suddenly have a subject called knowledge management? And so many people around the world are now studying it. This is an interesting development and I thought to start this program I'll talk to you a little about the history of knowledge management, where it came from, how it developed and where it might be going. It seemed to me and to some of the program organizers a good way to start. In the year 1500, now you're going to have to put on your hats as historians. In the year 1500, centers of knowledge were pretty evenly spread around the world. Places where practical knowledge was developed. Certainly Europe, China, India, possibly parts of South America and parts of Africa. It was sort of an even distribution, an even distribution of practical knowledge. Navigation, weaponry, food, cultures. Because of circumstances, excuse me, I'm going to take my watch off to keep track of the time. You can just tell me when I have to stop. So okay, just let me know. Okay. Because of circumstances that's a tremendous puzzle to historians. Western Europe began to develop differently. It was all even, but Western Europe began to take off. This is again a very, very contentious issue. Why Western Europe? Most of us, I think most people believe that intelligence and creativity is evenly spread among peoples of the earth. Therefore there must be some reason why this happened in Western Europe. I'm not going to review all the theories for this. Some of them are that because it broke into different religions. So people began to question things. When you have numerous types of religion in an area, you have more questioning of things because the religions fight each other. So people look for different arguments. That's one reason. Temperate climate might be a good reason. A system of laws develops. You could own property and you can own intellectual property. Another reason is the exploration of the world. Western Europe began to explore the world because those countries in Western Europe competed with each other. A lot of competition. China was a country itself. They didn't have internal competition. India had some, but not a lot. In Europe you had really different countries to take some example. Spain, England, Holland, Portugal competed. And this competition led to practical knowledge of weaponry, navigation, ships. So they began to reward people who could do science and technology, who could develop new things, develop new forms of knowledge. That competition is not a bad... Some people have said the entire growth of... A great deal of the growth of science and technology in the last hundred years were based on war. Money for wars. I don't know if that's a fair trade. Was it worth having the wars to have all that science? Maybe not, but that's the way it worked. So, an interesting thing happened. From about 1850 to the end of World War II, three regions of the world dominated the production of useful and practical knowledge. Those three areas were west in Europe. The United States... What's the third? No one ever gets this right. Japan, right. Japan, who said that? Hey, you heard me say this before now. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just joking. Japan, for reasons I absolutely can't go into now, it's a very interesting subject, but we don't have time. Those three areas... Why did they get this monopoly? Because they suppressed the knowledge institutions in other parts of the world. India, which was certainly as advanced as any place, the English just suppressed the universities. They suppressed learning for their own economic advantage. They certainly did in China. They just stopped it. They suppressed the knowledge. Latin America. For various reasons of trade and politics, it was called imperialism. So by 1850 to the Second World War, that was the case. There was knowledge that spread out in Brazil, in Argentina, wet Eastern Europe, certainly, but generally it was less productive and far less impact than those three regions. Human beings being what they were in the Second World War, two of those regions tended to destroy themselves. Japan and Western Europe. They did a good job of trying to destroy themselves. They didn't quite succeed, but they tried pretty hard. The United States didn't, although it certainly cost them a lot. After World War II, everything began to change in terms of the production and capability of knowledge. It shifted. England tried to hold on to their empire. Couldn't do it. They wanted to keep India. They were bankrupt, and there were no more people to fight. They couldn't hold it. France tried to keep a good chunk of northern Africa, southeast Asia. They couldn't do it. The Dutch tried to keep Indonesia. All these European countries tried to hold on to their empire. They were broke, and they were tired, and they couldn't do it. Those countries slowly began to develop knowledge capabilities. It began to spread around the world the capabilities of developing knowledge, of using knowledge. Slow diffusion because they couldn't be stopped. The United States has a different sort of imperialism, and they didn't want to stop the knowledge from flowing. They just wanted to make money and trade. So in many ways, it was easier for them to develop the knowledge capability of these other areas. Other things contributed to this. Cheap transportation. Cheaper transportation. It may be awful, but it's cheap. The growth of technologies which allowed materials and slowly using computers, documents to move around the world. The Marshall Plan. The UN. The World Bank. Organizations that set out to spread useful knowledge. To develop knowledge capabilities. That's one of the reasons we're here. It's a UN organization. That was their function. So if you drew a map of how knowledge spreads. I should do this sometime. I'm just not good at design. You could see it after World War II spreading. In 1968, I graduated college. And the United States was indulging in one of its periodic wars that they liked doing. And I didn't want to fight it, and I didn't have to. So I went around the world with two friends. We traveled around the world. I was young, didn't have much money, but I did it. And I stopped at different places. One of the places I stopped was Malaysia. Nobody went to Malaysia then. What was Malaysia like in 1968? Some of you are from Malaysia, I know. What was it like in 1968? What do you think? If you don't know, just guess. What do you think it was like? 1968. Use your imagination. It was a British-owned rubber plantation run by the Chinese. No intellectual life. Women were just nowhere. Nothing was going on. Intellectually dead. What's Malaysia today? It ain't that. High-powered, high-tech manufacturing center. A nation rapidly evolving to first-world economic and scientific status. What happened? They developed the knowledge capability. They learned things. They built universities. They began traveling. They began reading and studying. A complete shift. My friends and I stopped in Southern India in 1968. I don't have to tell you what Southern India looked like in 1968. We were astounded at the poverty. Just astounded, overwhelmed. And I wasn't rich. I was almost poor myself. Compared to the South India, I felt like a king. Go to Southern India today. Go to Bangalore. And not only there. All the code comes from there. Very modern place. Universities in India certainly as good as anywhere else. It's all changed. We stopped in Ireland. One of my friends was Irish. Ireland in 1968. Run by the Roman Catholic Church. No intellectual life except religion. Nothing. Completely changed. Knowledge went around the world. Knowledge capabilities went around the world. It's a world now where knowledge is everywhere. Look at yourselves. Look at a group like this. Look at the talk we just heard. About where there are centers of physics and practical uses of nuclear energy. It's the first time in the history of the world that it looks this way. That knowledge is evenly distributed. Maybe not totally evenly, but getting there. You can see it. It wouldn't be hard to do that. First time ever. It's a new development. That's somewhat the background of what we're talking about. Knowledge management. Because as this occurred, commercial organizations, countries, NGOs like the UN, began to realize the sources of wealth and the distribution of how wealth is dismayed has become global. It's become global. When China and India entered the labor force big time, it shifted everything. When Africa began to enter the labor force in Latin America, cheap transportation, technology, it shifted the economics. It shifted the way money was made to the degree that knowledge began to be seen as an infinitely more valuable resource, infinitely more valuable than the traditional sources of wealth. Economics, up until fairly recently, just dealt with three sources of wealth. Land and everything that's in the land. Labor and financial capital. Those are the sources of wealth. You read economics. It's still, most economists don't really get this. If you look at a textbook, they'll still say things like this. It's not true anymore. A good idea is worth more than anything like that. I'll give you two quick examples in my own life. I was a management consultant for quite a while in the city of Boston. That's where I live now, from New York, but I live in Boston. And we used to have once a month people who were consultants in Boston would get together for lunch and someone would present a new idea that they had. One of those presenters was Jeffrey Bezos, who founded Amazon. And he told us his idea about how to sell books through computers. It sounded pretty reasonable. Amazon is now worth $1 trillion. All of us use it. It was based on a bit of knowledge that he had. More valuable than land, labor, and technology. Look up the story of Google, how it got founded. Two graduate students, I think in physics, or certainly computer science, developed a search algorithm, a piece of knowledge. How much is Google's worth almost as much as Amazon? Changed our lives. Knowledge is the most valuable thing in the world, practical knowledge. The other sort of knowledge is pretty valuable too, but you can't put a number on it. This thing is pretty obvious to all of us, but we don't have all the pieces in place. Ron Young and I were talking about this, that it's still difficult to measure knowledge, to understand this commercial value, to put, you can't trade it on the stock market. So because of that, people don't quite have a handle on it. You don't know quite what to do with it. It sounds good, turns into an Amazon or a Google, sounds wonderful, but it's not quantifiable, and you can't capture it, and there's a lot of things you can't do with knowledge yet. It's only, you know, as a discipline, it's only about 30 years old. So, now let's talk about, this is from the macro, we're going to move down to sort of more micro concerns. In the late 1980s, there was a slogan that was developed by Microsoft going around, saying if the right information went to the right person at the right time, you would enter the promised land, you would enter Nirvana, you'd go to heaven, you'd be very happy. I was a management consultant then, but I had taken a PhD in the history of ideas, and I knew something about how ideas work and things like that, and I said, that doesn't sound true to me. If the right information got to the right person at the right time, it would be useful. It's good to get the right information to the right person, but if that were the case, everyone would get to the same information. There wouldn't be a competitive advantage. Just everyone would have the same information. It was published in a book, it was published in a paper. There must be something else. Why are countries different? Why are firms different? Why are organizations, it can't be information because everyone can get information, especially today, you really can get it, but we could see it going on in the late 80s with computerization. So what was the missing ingredient here? Ah, right, knowledge, exactly. As luck would have it, I got a job, luck plays a great deal of role in your life. You may not know this, but you'll know it when you're older. That luck is a big thing of what happens to you. Be lucky, it's better than being smart. I got a job as a pure researcher with a firm called Ernst & Young. They opened up a research center in Boston and I got hired. I could spend my time reading and thinking about what makes countries and companies different with some other people. And we began to think, maybe it's knowledge. But no one had written about knowledge. It wasn't any textbook. We couldn't find people who were interested in knowledge. Psychologists were, but that didn't... Philosophers, big time were interested in knowledge. But we're talking about practical knowledge. Peter Drucker, an Austrian-born American management scholar, began to talk about this. Probably one of the best management thinkers ever. He began to talk about knowledge work, knowledge workers, the nature of knowledge. He was a good man, Drucker. I wrote to him, he said, can I come and talk to you? He's a lovely fellow, very cosmopolitan and charming. Had a heavy German accent, which I just about could follow. And he said, yes, it's knowledge. He said, what do you do with knowledge? It's wonderful to say that. And he looked at me and said, I don't know. Well, I did no other, but I was paid to know these things. So I began to study this. I and some other people, about 20, 30 of us, began to study knowledge in organizations. What do you do with it? How is it done? What do you do? You say knowledge. Everyone knows the head. It's like motherhood or love or peace. People say, that's wonderful. Then they go home. So we didn't know quite what to do with knowledge. Again, Ernst and Young let me do this. It's hard to understand why they weren't even interested in knowledge. In fact, they told me they'd rather we didn't study this because they couldn't sell it. I then was recruited by IBM to start a research laboratory to studying knowledge. This is, again, a spectacular opportunity. And I, again, and plenty of other people, began to write about it. We held conferences about it. We found organizations that were interested in knowledge and were starting to move that way. The World Bank, British Petroleum, Xerox, IBM, Fujitsu. Quite a few fairs were going to say, we'd like to do something with knowledge. We think it's the most important thing, but we don't know what to do with it. So we began to start to think, what can an organization do with knowledge? What can a country do with knowledge? What can a region do with knowledge? And then we saw the beginnings of knowledge management, where it started. Now, as the Roman poet Horace said, nothing comes from nothing. So we used a number of tools that already existed. Nothing comes out of de novo. There's nothing that's new in the world, really. If something is new, it's either wrong or it's old. That may not be true with pure science, but it's certainly true with social science. Three intellectual threads, streams, led into knowledge management. One was information management. Now, there's a big difference between knowledge and information. This is something no economist admitted or no social science admitted. Even now, I've spoken to people who are high up Nobel Prize winners sometimes, and they say, knowledge is just useful information. That can't be true. If that was true, everyone would have the same knowledge. The whole world would look alike, and it doesn't. But information management was a big source of knowledge management, though the two words are very different. Don't be fooled into thinking they're the same. The quality movement would stress processes, which stressed individuals' own learning fed into knowledge management. And there were a number of others. Again, I don't think it's the right time or place to go into those sort of details. So we developed the first generation. We, practitioners, researchers, consultants, the first generation of knowledge management. About 1990, this started, and lasted about eight years. Now, what was it like then? Well, it was heavily based on technology. The United States, I'd say England too, I'd say Western Europe, is deeply technocentric and technophiliac. I would say in the U.S., it's the home of what I call techno-utopianism. Most people in the United States think technology will solve all problems. Maybe you believe that, maybe you don't. But certainly it was the first generation of that. If you've got enough technology, everyone has a computer on their desk, there's a knowledge department, boom, you don't have to do much else. So that was the first generation of knowledge management. Another issue, which I was, again, talking to my friends about, and we still haven't resolved this, what was the unit of analysis? This is a term used in economics. If you go to a conference like this, this is really a conference, but if you go to a knowledge conference, you get riled up. We're going to do something about knowledge. Executives go to these conferences, I got paid for speaking at them, so do these guys. And they go back and say, okay, let's do something about knowledge. Well, to do that, you have to say, what is it you're going to work with? What is the thing itself? Books, documents, people, prayer, what are you going to do? It's called the unit of analysis. In physics, they can answer these questions, but we couldn't in knowledge management. So people decided that the unit of analysis that would fit the first generation was the individual, knowledge worker, that's what Drucker talked about, be a road warrior, carry a computer, it has all your knowledge, and boom, you're a great knowledge worker. This didn't work too well. Because, well, there's a number of reasons, but I'll tell you one that's one of the most useful things I'm going to tell you during this week. Individual knowledge is not that important. In fact, there are philosophers, Wittgenstein being the foremost, who said there's no such thing as individual knowledge. He may be right. There's individual memories. I can remember, I'm the only one in the world alive today, I can remember my grandmother. You can all remember. Probably the first person you ever kissed. If you can't, I'm sorry. But generally, those are memories. Individual knowledge doesn't really exist. It's a social construction. The words we use, the categories we think in are social, not individual. A grandmother. Your first kiss. Your first day at college. The first great book you read. Those are shared. The words are shared. The concepts are shared. They're shared in your group, your unit, your country, your region, whatever. But they're shared. They're not individual. Saying individual knowledge is the key to working with knowledge is just not true. It doesn't work. I sort of thought it then, but I didn't know how to explain it. And other people did too. We were all wrong. It still goes on. You all need to have knowledge. You want to grow your knowledge, that's fine. But you do it socially. Look in this class. I'm talking to you. You're thinking. You're reading. You're discussing things. You're doing it socially. You're not doing it individually. I don't want to offend anyone, but this is one of the reasons that distance learning is not really learning. You need to learn socially. You need the emotions. You need to bond and use the same terms. It's not a taunt to go into it, but... So that first generation, another thing happened to it, the first generation of knowledge management, it got taken over by hustlers, consultants, journalists, vendors, the big technology vendors, began to think, you want to work with knowledge by the software, by SharePoint. Read these books. Do this, do that. Do everything but think. Do everything but sit down and think. What knowledge do we have? What do we need to have? How are we going to gain that knowledge? Many executives would rather do anything but think. They'd rather spend money than think. So they bought a lot of software. They hired a lot of consultants. And the word got a bad name. So knowledge management began to fall down a little. Part of the problem is that if you buy technology, it can only manage what is called explicit knowledge. Knowledge that's codified. Codified knowledge. Let me tell you something else useful about knowledge. Picture a spectrum. Here's A and here's B, a long spectrum. With the word knowledge underneath it. At one end of the spectrum would be the Pythagorean theorem. Remember the Pythagorean theorem? I bet you all do. You don't know it. A squared plus B squared because it's a pretty, it's part of geometry. Picture any formula or any algorithm. It's a piece of knowledge. If you say you want to know about geometry, you'd have to know figuring out the side of a triangle. You'd just have to know that. But it's self-contained. It's a contextual. It's not dependent on context. It's true all over the world. It's probably true in outer space. It's just true. You don't have to believe it. It's true nonetheless. It's a piece of knowledge. Totally self-contained. Totally on its own. Let's move over to the other end of that spectrum. Let me think of a good way to describe this. I have a friend in Boston. He's Irish. Everyone in Boston is Irish. Even if you're not Irish, you're Irish. You become Irish by living there. And he brought over some students of his from Trinity College in Ireland. One of the, we were talking about knowledge and this types of knowledge. And this fella told me his brother was a famous horse trainer in Ireland. The Irish love horses and they love riding. Ron loves horses too. He lives by horse training. But the Irish have steeple chases and they have a lot of races. And this guy said, my brother is a great trainer of horses. He's famous throughout Ireland for training horses. He got offered a contract by a big book publisher to write a book, How He Trains Horses. If he could do it, you could do it and you could make a lot of money as a horse trainer. So he took the money, big advance, sat down to his computer and started to write the book, How I Train Horses. He couldn't do it. He certainly knew English language. He was a university graduate, smart fellow. He couldn't say anything except banalities, cliches, you know, love the horse, listen to the horse, treat the horse well. I could have said that and I've never been in a damn horse. He couldn't say what he did. But he certainly had the knowledge to train a horse. He could prove it. You could see the horses he trained will win. That's also knowledge. So the same word in English, knowledge, means the Pythagorean theorem, which anyone could learn, you could send it around the world on a document to everyone who lives. That's knowledge and training that horse, which is a difficult thing to do and he couldn't say how he did it. He even hired people to help him, other trainers. He couldn't quite say anything that was worth saying in a document, but he could train the horse. The same word. This creates a lot of problems for knowledge management because you have the same word in English, knowledge. Latin languages have two such words, Savoie and Canetra, as you could say in French. Germans have two words. But it's a very complex subject. The classical Greeks had nine different words for knowledge. I've actually studied. I found this very, very interesting. One of them was Techni, which is the basis of the word technology. Another was Episteme, which is the basis of the term for the study of knowledge, epistemology. It all sorts of words. Words for cunning, words for savviness, words for knowledge on the ground, different types of knowledge. But we have one word in English, knowledge. So when you say I'm going to build a knowledge system, you're only talking about a way of dealing with codified knowledge. It has nothing to do with people training horses or people having great intuitive leaps in science or anything else. This is quite a great problem. So that first generation of knowledge management, I'll give you a couple of examples. So you keep reminding me of the times. Okay. The Coca-Cola company decided to spend $1 billion on a gigantic knowledge system. Billion dollars. They put in place a bureaucracy to do this, but all the latest technology. And what it was was an information system which they already had. They just now have two of them. Total failure. It was called knowledge. Everyone got excited. No one thought, is this really knowledge? What knowledge do you need in Coca-Cola outside of figuring out the formula for making the damn stuff? The Chrysler Corporation, an American company building these cars, decided to build something called the Book of Knowledge. It would capture all the knowledge at Chrysler. This is something that a science fiction writer would have written. I mean, it was so crazy. And I went to Chrysler and said, who believes that you could capture all the knowledge of 120,000 employees? What are you going to capture? We have great mechanics. I know you do. But they can't say what they do. And even if they did, other people couldn't do it. They didn't believe me. They didn't think knowledge was experiential. They thought it was all documents, words. Things you could codify. They spent half a billion dollars and went out of business. This went on and on. So knowledge management, the first generation, began to decline. However, the need for the subject grew stronger. More people in more countries around the world knew more things and could do more things with knowledge than ever before. The U.S. and Western Europe, their economies became very, very competitive because India could do things, China could do things, Africans could do things, people in Brazil could do things that they couldn't do before. Everything became more competitive and the competition, if you base the competition on labor, those countries that had a higher standard of living were going to go bankrupt. They had a higher standard of living on knowledge, so people and countries and governments began to think if we don't know things, if we don't invest in knowledge, we're sunk. Now, some countries, some of you represent these countries, I don't want to get into these discussions of politics, it's have the resource curse. I'll pick one, your native country, Argentina. In 1900, they had everything, a perfect climate, all sorts of resources, a high intellectual base, Europeans settled there, universities. What is Argentina today? What caused that? All sorts of reasons, but they had a resource curse, they had so many good resources they didn't invest in knowledge. It's called the resource curse. Russia does this, I do some consulting because they have great natural resources they under invest in knowledge. Look at the, there's a wonderful World Bank report that's the clearest example of this you could ever imagine. In 1955, South Korea and Nigeria had the same GNP per capita. South Korea and Nigeria were about even in terms of wealth. What's in Nigeria? What resources are in Nigeria? Yeah, minerals, oil, gas, it's a rich country blessed by nature. What's in South Korea? Koreans. Not nothing. There are Koreans there. Yeah, exactly. The Koreans have a very strong culture, same thing Japan and China to be based on respect for learning, respect for knowledge. There's no resource in Korea, it's a rocky country with no resources like Japan. Look at these countries that have no resources. Singapore, Israel, Finland, they're all rich because they can't fall back on resources. So fast forward what number is Korea in the world economy today? South Korea? England. It's a richer country than England. No one on Earth would have said that in 1955. Not one person on Earth, but it passed England. All based on practical knowledge, knowledge capability every cent. The Nigerians stayed the same. They didn't do this. Give you an example of two other examples of how this works. Norway is one of the richest countries in the world today. I think it is, it's in the top three. Why is Norway rich? Oil. You got it, one word, oil. They didn't know they had it, they found it and got rich. Do you know what Norway does with that money? They don't give it back to the people. What does Norway do with that money? They invest, they keep it and invest it very carefully. They don't return it to the people who live there in terms of tax breaks. It's an expensive place to live. They keep the money and invest it in smart things. Universities, laboratories, places like this. Dubai is very rich. What does Dubai have? Or the Emirates, what do they have? Gas. A lot of gas and oil. A couple of years ago Dubai built a ski slope. It's the hottest place in the world. And they built a ski slope. Think about those contrasts. Again, I don't want to... If you don't invest in knowledge, you're not doing such a hot job. So the second generation of knowledge management appeared because the world began to realize. Pundits, writers, people like me began to realize you can't get rich without knowledge. You can't make any progress without knowledge. Nothing happens without knowledge. And we began to think about it. That second generation was in advance over the first. The first advance was that the acknowledgement that the unit of analysis should not be the individual or the enterprise. You still could see companies like Oracle or SAP say enterprise-wide knowledge management is a complete baloney. It's not true. The unit of analysis became a social aggregate. What do I mean by that? Some of you mentioned that... Marie Elena mentioned in her talk that some of the things you're studying. Networks, communities, and practices began to emerge as that's the unit you should study. If you want to work with knowledge, look at those three things. Networks... Networks, communities, and practices. 20 people, 50 people, 150 people who share vocabularies, emotions, stories, practices, like string theorists. They all know each other. It's a practice. The same thing in organizations. It is. This is where the knowledge clumps. This is where the knowledge sticks. If you did a CAT scan, you know what a CAT scan is? If you did a CAT scan of an organization and looked for the knowledge, it would be in those places. Practices, networks, and communities. This has been done by network theorists. This has actually been done. The second generation acknowledged that. It was a big step forward. Another big step forward on a more mundane level is we began to realize how do you govern a knowledge function in an organization? What's the governance structure within an organization for knowledge? The first generation said, we're the knowledge department. We will manage the knowledge. This would sound a little like a dictatorship or so. People resented the hell out of that. Imagine if someone came to an organization and said, I'm here to manage your knowledge. You know, what an Italian they got. No one would acknowledge that. So we began to think it has to be governed. You have to have a knowledge department. Nothing happens without governance. One of the things Peter Drucker said that wasn't right. He said, knowledge is everybody's business. If something is everybody's business, what happens? Nobody does it. Exactly right. You wait for someone else to do it. So there has to be some governance mechanism. And in the second generation it began to be seen that maybe the best way to do this is a small group who would empower, help, aid, give resources to people who are closer to the actual work. Closer to the work. You can't manage the knowledge. Well, the World Bank, I think Ashok's going to talk about the World Bank. You can't manage an organization that's dispersed. That's large, geographically. You can't manage it from sitting in your office. You just can't do it. You have to be out there. You can provide resources and help, like a small group. But you need a different model. All of us are going to talk about this a little later. I just want to put a bookmark to it. And the second important development in that third, that second generation was the acknowledgement that the valuable knowledge in any organization is not documents. It's in tacit. It's not documented. It's not documentable. It's not documentable. You can't reduce all knowledge to a document. It can't be done. Maybe one day, who knows? I'm not going to talk about the future. I don't know what neither do you. But I know today it can't be done. It's not documented. It's not documented. It's not documented. They mean capturing information and documents. All the important things in life can't be captured or documented. Love, family, piety, patriotism. You can't capture that. You can't even document it. But we all sort of feel that. We all live that way. We all live that way. We all live that way. We all live that way. How do you scale knowledge? If you can't write it down. If you can't document it. How do you get it to work? How do you make it more efficient, more effective, more innovative? And that became a key issue. We still are having trouble. This is still a very big issue in knowledge management. How do you scale knowledge to be easily transferred and certainly can't be easily documented? What do you do with that? What do you do with that? You have meetings like this. You pointed that out. This is what you do through a large extent. You talk to one another. You work together. But again, we'll talk about that a little later. I'm talking too cloudly. So that would sort of leave us to the current generation of knowledge management for the third generation, who are going today. Good examples. Some of the things, I made a few notes as you were talking, I'm trying to speak about things that would make some sense to you. Giving your own backgrounds. Some of the things that are happening is rather than try to manage knowledge itself, organizations and countries are building what you call knowledge capabilities. A capability is a different word than resource. All human beings are smart. Being smart is distributed evenly around the world. So they all have the same knowledge resources in a way. A capability would allow the knowledge to be useful, to be turned into something that would help people. Either create wealth, cure illnesses, go to Mars. Capability. It's a good word to use when you're dealing with knowledge. So what are capabilities? What do they look like? What are they in real life? Institutions, governance structures, culture. A culture that respects knowledge. One of the saddest things in the world, from my perspective, being a United States citizen, is that the respect for knowledge which made the United States a rich country is dying. It's hard to understand why and I'm not going to go into it here. But their respect for learning and knowledge is declining. People no longer believe in science and no longer believe as strongly as they do. In just the respect for teachers, things like that. While it's growing in other parts of the world, one of the great things you can discover if you just open your eyes and travel a lot and read is the globe is very dynamic. Human history is dynamic. Everything moves. Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. Countries rise, countries fall. But certainly, for those such an international audience, build knowledge institutions, build capabilities in your country, in your own organizations. Laws, protocols, respect for learning, promote people who promote knowledge, have social norms of knowledge development. I'm going to talk about this more tomorrow. But knowledge capabilities is a key thing that's going on. Rather than, say there's one size fits all, organizations do this in different ways. We're moving away from that one size fits all to the idea that countries and organizations know how to do things. They can't do anything. They disappear. But they're different. It's very different running a big oil company. I've consulted to six or seven large oil companies. They're all different. Even though the products are the same, they're all different. Exxons are very different from the British petroleum. But they do things differently. Find a way to do something that suits the culture and history and the structure of your organization. So that's a really important development that's happened in this third wave. Another one is the incredible value of culture in understanding how knowledge works. If you work in an organization that doesn't respect how people behave or they assume all behavior is based on money or all behavior is based on a hierarchy, you're just not going to get anywhere with knowledge. This is a tremendous problem in many countries and many organizations Another little bit of history. In the 1850's and 60's technology allowed large scale corporations to be developed. Which would have many different tasks spread over space and time. This particular thing happened in four countries again. In the United States it happened. We built railroads. Big railroads. Loved with space over time and it's a complex technological task. In England it happened. Manufacturing clothing, cloth, steel and iron. It happened in Germany. Manufacturing electronic, electric goods generators and chemicals. And slowly it happened in Japan. Manufacturing munitions. Manufacturing steel and iron. To do this this was a new thing in the world. Large scale complex tasks over space and time. To do this you needed a new type of organization. Before that that type of work was done by family firms. Small little enterprises. It wasn't done. They needed a new form. Legally it was existed in England. The corporations existed in England legally. But they didn't know how to do it. What models were available to do work like that? Nothing comes from nothing. No one invented it from the sky. They used what they could see in front of them. What two models existed for that? For doing work like that? Who else did that? The military. They could do that. Complex work over time and space. What are the hallmarks of the military organization? Hierarchy. Big time hierarchy. You do this, you do that. Discipline. Which way does knowledge flow in the military? That was the model they used for companies. Even now I've heard people say you hear that all the time. This is a lean and mean company. They get that from the military. You do this. I'm your boss. It's changing. The military is changing in most countries. But it's still that there's been no model to replace it. That model created an enormous amount of wealth for the world. The amount of work the GNP of the world increased 14 times from 1900 to 2000. 14 times. Not 14%. The wealth went wild based on that model. You do this, you do that. If you don't do it, you're out of here. I've worked at IBM. It's my way of the highway. It's something a general might say. So it worked. But it doesn't work for knowledge. It's a terrible model for knowledge. Why is it wrong for knowledge? Because it only goes this way. If you have a good idea when you're at the bottom, imagine a private telling a general, hey, I have a better idea to deploy those forces. Good luck with that. So the knowledge just goes one way. And if the person in charge isn't that smart, you get some terrible battles. It doesn't work. Another way it does work, if knowledge is valuable. So I live in a city Boston. There's a lot of knowledge-based enterprises in Boston to put up modeling. If you tell someone who's a bright young scholar in pharmaceuticals. There's a lot of good pharmaceutical firms in Boston. Hey, do this. What happens? They tell you, you know what, and I'm out of here. Because they can always work somewhere else. So you can't run things that way. You have to run things very different. We need different models of organizing to take advantage of knowledge. And that's being worked on today very slow to change. Very slow to change. Most organizations I know that are still slowly changing, but it's slow. Nothing happens fast. Nothing happens fast. So let's go ahead. Ten minutes? Probably I'm going to be speaking again on some of these subjects a little more elaborately in the next few days. So why don't we, I'm told you a lot of stuff. I don't think you'll remember if I say anything more. Why don't you ask some questions or make some comments? Do you guys have something you'd like to ask about this or talk about this? Yes, I bet you do. Where do you get asked this? In the US? The UK. The UK, same thing. Ask them if they measure love. Ask them what the ROI on children is. You can't measure knowledge per se. Full stop. You can measure knowledge outcomes. You can measure the amount of papers produced at a university. You've talked about the Nobel Prize winners and the awards. That's a knowledge outcome. Patents. Speeches at conferences. New products. Impact. Outcomes. You can do all that. IBM puts an A in the newspapers every year. We have the most technology patents in the world and it's true. They couldn't do it if they didn't have knowledge capabilities. You can't measure the knowledge itself. That's a myth. That's completely nuts. So measure the outcomes. Measure the outputs. Measure the impact. I know people think they can but they're wrong. Any other questions? Thank you for the presentation. My name is Marius from South Africa. You said knowledge management is a very new subject. Well, I will ask, is it a new subject in the sense of putting it in a way that it can be more developed? Or are you saying people only started managing knowledge in the recent years? No, I'd say it's only new in the way it's been approached using more technology and different ways of understanding it. Obviously, the people who built the pyramids manage knowledge. People in Africa use knowledge since they've been in Africa. But it's the way it's been approached more systematically. If I was speaking more rigorously, the systematic and repeatable management of knowledge is fairly new. It's happened in my lifetime. But managing knowledge, look at the history of the world, say you're right. Thanks for the very interesting presentation. Well, just a couple of comments. Well, I confirm, for example, that at ICTP, when we recruit even the youngest scientist, he's not told what kind of research he's supposed to do. We only ask, do you're the best science in this area because you are recruited in an area of particle physics or condensed matter? The best research you can do to publish in the burst journals and then, obviously, share this knowledge for a fraction of your time with people from developing countries so that we don't give we never use the world practical knowledge. We like to think about basic knowledge as the requirement for developing countries to build all the rest. There is a form of not of practical knowledge, but of basic knowledge. And a lot of practical knowledge then actually is built on this basic knowledge. For example, in the 1700s there were people who really there were people like Torricelli or Volta, the nobility of Italy, without any scope for practical things and they invented electricity. They understood the pressure of the atmosphere and all these things that then were key ingredients for doing the practical knowledge when the conditions were right. In my studies on human origins I can confirm that as a modern homo sapiens with the same brain we have today evolved a long time after having evolved a body like we have today including our head and that was when there was a total redesign of the brain architecture and that happened only 100,000 years ago. This brain architecture was this very thing that you are discussing in your lecture which is the capability to share knowledge with the others. But then something happened in the last 100,000 years in the last 50,000 years up to today that we transform ourselves and that is also important for the discussions for the points you made about individual hominids or humans into a very, very complex and connected social organism. Now you refer to that and now for us is now when you study human origin people like me as a physicist I am open minded but sometimes my colleagues for parietropology they look at individual changes on but I like to think of the social organism with different beasts all together because now we became like termites or ants but only we are flexible because instead of using signals like ants and termites chemical signals or other we use culture and knowledge in order to connect and to become flexible so we are flexible but now when you analyze and you say the last generation of thinkers in relation to knowledge management you talk about aggregates and so to share emotions and all that that is really very relevant because we are dealing with this social organism so when you discover as you implied I think the Higgs boson or where you go to the moon there is not the homo sapiens discovering the Higgs it's the organism homo sapiens even if you have people like Einstein but all their intuitions are based on this social knowledge so I think it's interesting to really create a connection particularly this very fascinating science of knowledge management between the origin of our mental capabilities and the transformation from an individual to a social organism for understanding really what is going on what went on because there are going to be big implications in the future for the very new technologies that we develop the digital networks and then the artificial intelligence you know they are going to interfere with everything we developed in the last 100,000 years because we have a new way of sharing knowledge we cannot handle and there are also negative aspects in becoming a social organism for example people are measuring a shrinking of the human brain in the last 50,000 years because well there are the optimists like my friend Jan Tattersal from New York saying oh yes we have a better software in the brain so we need less hardware you like the computers no I said Jan I think our problem is that since 50,000 years ago more and more we are so sharing a lot of information with other humans in the social organ so we don't need really to retain a lot of information we are delegating and then obviously with the writing first and the other tools including the digital networks we are delegating more and more outside our brain a lot of this knowledge capabilities and that is going given that our brain is plastic there is a feedback which is influencing our brain so these are also intriguing aspects related to knowledge management sorry for taking all this time No it's fine I wish we had more time we could have a round table discussion with the audience and you are absolutely right I mean it does change everything it's really the myth of individual genius the myth is still so pervasive I mean everyone talks about Steve Jobs as if he did this himself or even Einstein he didn't do all that stuff himself no one does anything much themselves I mean that doesn't take away from their tremendous genius and their tremendous qualities far be it for me to say that but no one does anything by themselves nothing of that Newton was modest enough Newton who said I'm staying on the shoulders of the giants this is why I'm doing this if he said that and he was a great genius think about the rest of us right well that's a good point that man had an inborn skill I would say a truly inborn skill of doing that but still to learn about horses it took tons of he reads all these books about horses he meets out the horses it's true it's like an athletic skill I mean it's true people are born musical skills you're sort of born with some of that you can learn it and develop it but I'm never going to be a great athlete no matter what I did that man was born with great empathy for animals but you still learn a lot you read other books you see you talk to that man the world the other train Einstein the world the other physicists in central Europe that man the world horse trainers what do you think they talk about horses we have one more question I have a question about the big infrastructural projects because my feeling is that nowadays especially in Europe the capability to build something big like for instance power plant or it doesn't matter so raffinary so has been lost because we have very huge release in this kind of projects and nobody can let's speed it up and you think that introduction of these knowledge management tools can't speed up this project and solve it that's so interesting to say there because I part of the little bit of work I do is working for the project management institute to teach project managers about knowledge that's actually something and I do that with NASA I'm going to talk about that the last talk I give is really right project management is innocent of a lot of what we know about knowledge it was developed as a form of engineering and it ignored what we know about knowledge that's changing it's changing quickly but you're right you're absolutely it'll change but it'll be slow it's one of the last engineers are some of the last people who want to change their own accountants they don't like changing their ideas very much but it'll happen that's a good question now all these questions yeah thank you I'd like to share a bit of my experience when you were talking especially at the time when you mentioned that before 1500 knowledge was distributed evenly I kind of agree with you and I studied in the United States for 7 years and if you realize in the United States it's like a cooking pot of diversity and I got to meet a lot of people and the way they do things and so I begin to ask myself I come from Ghana what about Ghana so when I went back home I went to the basics I started talking to my grandparents and I begin to realize right from technology medicine food, agriculture, literature they have everything but what happened and that is the question I've always been asking myself what happened and if you look right now a lot of countries I can use Ghana for example so many years back probably Ghana was a little better than Malaysia but now Malaysia is far, far ahead of Ghana and I'm still asking myself what happened and how can we begin to capture the knowledge that my grandparents have independently, for example how to extract iron from it all there's only one person left who can tell us how they used to do it that time and even with that how they are able to distinguish the all from other type of soil, there's nobody left who can do that now so I mean and we are losing a lot of such many people that's a great comment the World Bank has a couple of let me recommend two things these are subjects we could spend the whole year talking about, they're wonderful the World Bank has a whole unit that studies how do you capture indigenous knowledge knowledge that's native to the country look up the World Bank publications indigenous knowledge they have some very good books on that subject how to do that, you're absolutely right it's what you're saying is that knowledge is disappearing, medicine do you know they're beginning to find I know a woman who is a researcher for Novartis and she went down to the southern part of the United States and she learned the people who live with alligators there's a lot of alligators in Louisiana and she learned that people when their children had very bad rashes would put a piece of dead alligator skin on the rash and it would help it go away and she went back to Novartis and they made a drug out of this and made tons of money there's a great deal of truth in what you're saying an indigenous native knowledge that's disappearing read those books, try to start a program in Ghana I agree completely with you it's a tragedy to lose that knowledge because it's just as valuable as you know the more advanced knowledge knowledge is knowledge if it's valuable, if you could do something with it that's what counts it doesn't matter if it comes from a great university or from your grandparents that's the nice thing about knowledge if it's true, people recognize it if it's not true, it disappears those are very good questions UNESCO is trying to promote indigenous knowledge and all that UNESCO a lot of the NGOs are doing this I just know because I do work with the World Bank he can find all sorts of books and help them I agree with you he didn't know that, he wasn't an intellectual sort of guy but you're right they probably knew just what you're saying knew much better how to do it the horse meant you don't live unless you have a good horse I've experienced interacting with Aboriginal people in Australia they know things we don't know I know, I remember thinking my grandmother said you're going to university you're going to know these things I said you know things too but there are different types of things but she didn't believe that let me say thank you very much and I'll be here again for the whole session thank you very much