Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Men of mere high learning?

I read this nice story...

A matron helped deliver 20 babies a month in a hospital. She herself was a spinster though. Do you think inspite of this she had experienced the pleasure of giving birth to a baby, or the  pleasure of the mother's tender love for a child? This must be happening to Men of mere high learning right?

Everyone knows theory, all kinds of information is available on the world wide web. What gives the edge is the personal experience. That is true knowledge.

Then today I read a post on "What makes a good architect?" on our internal blogs where he stressed that a good architect had to be "scarred war veteran". Though idiomatically expresed, my belief was reinforced. One has to be hands on!

Would we want to be known as Powerpoint Professionals? or someone who says "I was part of the go-live team" and someone who did not drop out in the middle of execution.

As KMers we are change makers. I believe a KMer can be successful only if they have conviction. The conviction will come only by being a user of the systems we design. Be the change ourselves.

When we design systems, methodologies and culture changes if we are not the first users or the change we desire to bring about then we remain like the spinster matron, Men of mere high learning! I am not prejudiced so I add, and women too. 

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Social Media For All

The Confluence 2010 is over!

One successful event was on social media applications. We invited some leaders for a conversation on it. I was quite flabbergasted when one panelist mentioned that some leaders should blog and the others should just play the role of a reader!

It is indeed an autocratic statement. In this world of democracy and freedom of speech who are we to stop people from self expression? Social media is for all and thought leadership is not any single person's prerogative. As long as people have some thing to share by way of experience, thought, idea or more, I would encourage every employee to use social media application of their choice. No KMer should ever put a block on that.

We don't expect disruptive innovations to be shared on a daily basis but do look forward to small innovations in process, ideas etc to do a task better in a day to day work life. Disruptive innovations are rare but small innovations are bountiful.

Go each one of you go ...share what you know...Social media is for all.