An organization that incorporates the culture of knowledge has an enormous advantage. It cannot go unnoticed before any other step towards any other area. Just as it is impossible to create a hospital that does not have a culture of health and patient care, if a company does not have an assimilated culture of knowledge, you cannot think of any model of intellectual capital management.
The business culture is more connected with social factors than technological ones, in fact examples companies of intellectual capital have achieved recognition thanks to the application of social solutions and proposals, instead of technological remedies. Xerox seems to have understood it easily, for Enrique Cervetti "success in knowledge management has little to do with machines and technology, the process is 90% social and 10% infrastructure."
Companies must privilege the human connection more than the connection to the modem or any other technological element since technology is a support of the human and is used as a resource for people to streamline their tasks, at least this is the characteristic that companies show that have been successful in knowledge management. If there is no built-in culture, the intranet, virtual forums, virtual databases, the web, etc. will be useless.
Rhone-Poulenc SA, a leading French company in the chemistry and pharmacology sector, believes that creating a corporate culture that encourages creativity and innovation is essential when running a company in order to run a company in the XXI century. Peter Neff, chief executive of the company argues that the success of the company depends on people and the success of the company in the future will depend on the ability to exploit collective wisdom, made up of the accumulation of criteria, perceptions, experiences, intuition, and intelligence of all employees.
Incorporating a culture of knowledge also presents various drawbacks and problems. The most common is people's natural instinct not to share what they know with others. This is perhaps the main problem faced by human resources departments trying to apply any knowledge management practice. Also, in the best of cases, human capital is more predisposed to get knowledge, rather than deposit knowledge. It is true that knowledge is power and this partly explains the above, however there are other cultural factors.
The reason seems theoretically simple, people do not share the knowledge they have because they do not have a "reason" to "motivate" them to do so. From a practical point of view it seems more complicated, so we will see the three main causes:
Human resources do not share knowledge:
1. They don't know that someone else needs that information
2. There is a lack of favorable spaces and resources to disseminate knowledge
3. They are not awarded or recognized for sharing the accumulated knowledge they have
Providing spaces and resources to promote knowledge we find that people are willing to disclose everything they know. A Japanese pharmaceutical company set up a special room for people to gather for tea and to share data and information in an informal way. Other companies have put together virtual libraries where everyone has access to the information and subject they want. The digital yellow pages are also an excellent space to look for professionals and find out who did such a task or who the specialist is.
Recognition is an incentive that pushes us to continue doing so. Recognition does not have to be cheap. Experience and research related to the subject indicate that public recognition has more value for people than that linked to money.
A branch manager uses camels as a way of thanking them by throwing them to people at meetings. The most striking thing is that nobody eats the candies but they leave them on the desk as proof of the good contribution of knowledge in meetings. Another manager gives a toy firefighter helmet as a reward when he puts out a "fire" with new and innovative knowledge, these helmets are proudly displayed among employees
These are the results of a corporate culture committed to knowledge, however, the causes are much more powerful and are linked to other attitudinal aspects. If we talk about the importance of attitudes in human capital and place them at the base of human capital, we can summarize by saying that the sum of individual attitudes is what determines the culture in the company. To be more specific, here I have a pack of cigarettes, on one side it says: "Smoking is harmful to health." Despite this indication ……. how many people are still smoking? In a company, if you tell employees "They must share knowledge," how many will do it effectively and out of conviction?
The existence of a corporate culture inspired by the conviction of each one of the members is much more productive than a corporate culture applied by imposition from management, and this aspect must be taken into account when applying any practice to manage knowledge..
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