People-focused knowledge management

Participating in different teams fuels employees’ development
and provides them opportunities to share ideas and goals with
innovators and industry leaders.
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People-Focused Knowledge Management
Employees are encouraged to improve their competencies
through changing their positions. The aim is to give Palmera
people the opportunity to manage their own careers.
Personal growth is to be fostered in a challenging environment,
with clear visions, goals, and shared management and opera-
tional principles.
R&D’s five rules for competitive innovation are to spread people
around to maximize interaction opportunities; keep teams small
to allow all voices to be heard (listen!); use flat hierarchies to
minimize bureaucracy; encourage unusual (“crazy”) ideas
beyond normal boundaries — celebrate tinkering and side pro-
jects; welcome mistakes, for if there are no mistakes, we don’t
push the envelope hard enough!
The company and personal competence-related objectives in effect
rely extensively on active pursuit of new generation knowledge 
management (NGKM), which is practiced widely, deliberately, and
systematically throughout Palmera. However, the term knowledge
management is not used, at least not officially. Instead, the active
management of knowledge — development of personal and struc-
tural knowledge and intellectual capital (IC) and associated innova-
tion and competitive quality of work — is considered to be a natural
and integrated part of Palmera work styles and culture.
New Generation Knowledge Management
What is Deliberate and Systematic 
Knowledge Management?
Knowledge Management is the Major Enabler of Enterprise
Performance. People’s behaviors are guided and shaped by what
they know, understand, and believe, consciously or tacitly.
Knowledge, therefore, is the fundamental factor — the major
enabler — of enterprise performance. Consequently, a major
task for any enterprise is deliberately and systematically to
ascertain that personal and structural knowledge — intellectual
capital assets of all kinds — are created, captured, shared, and
leveraged to improve performance, and are also recycled to 
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People-Focused Knowledge Management in Daily Operations
217
Our primary interest in operating any enterprise is to make it
perform well. Through its actions, we want the enterprise to succeed
and prosper to the best possible extent by fulfilling its objectives. To
achieve that purpose, we focus on the individual since the enterprise’s
overall behavior is the aggregation of individual actions by people
and entities throughout the organization. 
In daily operations, knowledge enables effective enterprise per-
formance by making it possible for people to handle situations in
ways that are in the enterprise’s best interest. Other factors also influ-
ence people’s actions, but knowledge — understanding, competence,
expertise, skills, etc. — becomes the central factor in as much 
as it directly influences motivation and other subordinate factors.
However, it is knowledge that provides insights into what happens
in a given situation, why and what to do with it — how to handle it,
and how to do what is needed — how to act to change the situation
to the best advantage.
Consequently, the issue of assisting the workforce to act effectively
by being knowledgeable becomes a major concern. We need to
strengthen the knowledge-related processes, activities, and practices
by conducting active knowledge management. And if we agree that
KM is that important, we need to make it part of our daily opera-
tions and pursue it deliberately and systematically. Given these
premises, we must consider how we facilitate the processes that make
people better actors. Since enterprise performance is determined by
people’s actions and people’s effectiveness results from the knowledge
they utilize to handle situations, it is clear that KM must be people-
focused.
The focus of KM changed from artificial intelligence in the early
1980s to information technology (IT) during the 1990s, a focus that
for many is still dominant. However, with experiences within many
continually be improved. The initiatives and activities under-
taken and the practices pursued to achieve this goal are what
we mean by knowledge management.
Hence, knowledge management is the systematic and delib-
erate creation, building, renewal, application, and leveraging of
knowledge and other intellectual capital (IC) assets to maximize
the individual’s and the enterprise’s knowledge-related effec-
tiveness and returns.
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People-Focused Knowledge Management
advanced and proactive organizations, the focus has started to shift
toward KM as a major enabler of the performance of individuals.
The focus becomes centered on how we assist people in performing
their daily jobs better and how we motivate them to align their work
closer to the enterprise’s intended direction. The need for a new gen-
eration KM (NGKM) has emerged, a direction to govern knowledge-
related investments, activities, and support systems that are
people-focused and people-friendly and frequently supported signif-
icantly by IT. Those who now practice NGKM find it important to
practice it systematically to obtain the desired benefits and to make
it part of their employees’ daily work-life.
NGKM relies on practices that make it a natural part of people’s
daily work-life. In part, NGKM focuses on “natural knowledge man-
agement,” which makes it second nature and provides emotionally
preferred approaches to work. Our emerging understanding of how
people and organizational entities function, make decisions, and
handle situations with mental models and other reference models has
also changed our approaches to the “management” of knowledge.
Although knowledge itself cannot be managed, knowledge-related
processes, activities, and practices can be managed, as can conditions
related to knowledge creation, innovation, and use. Our under-
standing of the deeper workings of these processes is emerging,
notably our understanding of the role of stories for education and
the transfer of concepts, paradigms, and methodologies. Stories also
provide important foundations for developing the mental reference
models that we use tacitly and naturally to handle situations — by
“covert activation of biases related to previous emotional experiences
of comparable situations,” as stated by Bechara et al. (1997, p.
1294). NGKM becomes strategically and operationally important by
the explicit recognition of the human as a central knowledge-creator,
keeper of knowledge and knowledge-driven performer of work, and
in the aggregate the source of enterprise actions and behavior.