People-focused knowledge management

What Is Successful Enterprise Performance?
Traditionally in many people’s minds, successful enterprise per-
formance has been equated with good financial results. We take a dif-
ferent view. We adopt the view of many successful organizations and
outstanding thinkers (de Geus 1997; Drucker 1999; Herzberg 2003;
Mintzberg 2002, 2003; Pfeffer 2003). Good, successful performance
focuses on the enterprise’s capability to tackle and overcome chal-
lenges and both create and take proper advantage of opportunities
while balancing a broad range of internal dilemmas or paradoxes,
such as supporting all employees uniformly while at the same time
fast-tracking promising leaders. It also includes financial health,
which is a basic necessity. Behind this capability we find management
leadership to guide and motivate the enterprise. We find strong intan-
gible asset management mentality to create, maintain, and exploit
intangible capital assets, particularly intellectual capital (IC) assets
through deliberate and systematic KM. We also find widespread
interests focused on deep engagement in work; broad, forward-
looking critical thinking and situation-handling; a knowledgeable
and well-informed workforce that participates in cooperation instead
of politicking and competing; and an action-oriented, positive, and
fear-free culture that focuses on achievement and progress instead of
pursuing process issues and maintaining the status quo.
The successful and viable enterprise must continually satisfy its
stakeholders, and it must treat its customers in such a manner that
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The Effective Enterprise
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they will continue to demand its products rather than those of its
competitors. The enterprise must deliver products and services 
with greater overall value than those available elsewhere and must
provide them at attractive costs and with sufficient ease and support.
To achieve this, the enterprise must deal effectively with present 
and future challenges. It must implement its visions and strategies
through the personal actions that employees perform to opera-
tionalize enterprise strategy. That requires competent and well-
informed employees and organizational actions guided by systems
and procedures.
For many years, managers and academics have worked to develop
theories and approaches to make private and public enterprises more
effective. Conceptual frameworks outlining basic mechanisms have
been created based on insights from management, economic, social,
and cognitive sciences. Some advanced approaches focus on how
knowledge is used to support actions that contribute to enterprise
success. However, only recently has it been recognized how proac-
tive organizations obtain practical experience with these methods to
identify those that work in real life — in spite of many organizations
that have pursued such practices for decades or even centuries (de
Geus 1997).