People-focused knowledge management

Comments: Atlee’s approach to lasting and durable success
was built around a management philosophy of acting as a model
societal citizen and providing a highly attractive place to work.
Their approach had many benefits that management found
exceeded the costs of the efforts. The ability to maintain the high
performance across several dimensions also required consider-
able monitoring effort, which was judged to be worthwhile.
The knowledge-related aspects in this case included creating a
desirable work environment that made it possible to develop and
retain highly expert employees. Another aspect was the high degree
of competence required everywhere in the company to deliver the
operating and management performance needed to meet the desired
strategy.
Monitoring in the Enterprise
In today’s business environment, single-factor situation-handling
is a rarity except in highly routine cases. Most enterprise situations
are fraught with dilemmas caused by conflicting objectives such as
between quality and throughput, between satisfying a customer’s
special requirements and maintaining streamlined and efficient 
operations, between special treatment of fast-track employees and 
the general treatment and motivation of the workforce-at-large, and
so on. In addition to being complex, many conflict situations also
tend to be unfamiliar and are difficult to handle. Most need to be
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monitored — by superiors as well as by oneself — to ascertain that
they are handled to the best of the abilities of the people involved.
Our People Do Not Make Balanced Decisions! 
They Focus on One Factor Only!
Bob Taylor, Bromley Corporation’s operations manager, was
appalled at the quality of decisions made by most people in his
area. As he lamented: “Our people do not make balanced deci-
sions! When they handle situations, they tend to focus on only
one factor that will make it easy for them! And that results in
erratic actions that go in whichever direction and do not support
our corporate intents!” He pointed to numerous examples where
such sub-optimizing was carried to the extreme. Managers
focused on controlling inventory turnover at the expense of
acquisition costs, parts availability, and service levels. Service
and sales representatives expedited customers’ special orders in
expensive ways without considering other customers, costs, or
disruptions of operations. Plant operators wanted maintenance
assistance to maximize their own production immediately
without concern for others. Higher level managers and directors
also tended to pursue single objectives: the logistics director 
on several occasions demanded that production be rescheduled
to facilitate bulk shipping to reduce logistics costs without regard
for production costs, customer commitments, and other factors.
Bob felt that his people were not team players; they did not
collaborate, cooperate with each other, or even coordinate their
activities. They seemed to be interested solely in their own area
of responsibility to the exclusion of all others and seemed to
demand that everyone else would accommodate them. Bob was
confused because these individuals were reasonable and flexible
in other ways, and he could not understand their work behav-
ior. When approached, they readily agreed with him on the need
to deal intelligently with dilemmas and to balance the require-