Reviews

Swing Doors and Musical Chairs

by Arnold Kransdorff and Russell Williams

The management of one particular facet of intellectual capital is highlighted here--the retention of organizational memory (OM) and its significance for firms alongside the flexible labor model increasingly adopted over the last three decades.

The downside of flexible labor arrangements is the loss of hard-won know-how and experience in the form of tacit knowledge. Oral debriefings provide a powerful means of capturing OM. Glaxo Wellcome used this technique to transfer tacit knowledge from eight departing members of its planning department to 15 new hires; at Kraft Foods, the company's oral archive was used to fashion a new marketing approach to an old product (Cracker Barrel cheese).

Oral debriefing can also be used in project management, because it helps companies learn better from experiences--a discipline overlooked by many firms and also affected by a mobile work force. Ford has debriefed 1,200 employees in tracking the progress of teams in the United States, Hungary, Ireland, and Brazil; British Petroleum credits learning histories with savings in excess of $20 million in a three-year period. The "learning audit," a technique developed by London-based consultancy Pencorp, provides an oral debriefing method particularly suited to project management.

Publication Date: 5/15/99
Business Horizons Article Product Number: BH026; 6p.

To order this article and others that may be of interest to knowledge managers and practitioners, see: Harvard Business Review

Permission to reprint given by George Pratt, Assistant Director, Marketing, Harvard Business School Publishing

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