The Executives Role in Knowledge Management

The absolute, most critical success factor in knowledge management (KM) success is senior-level support. The Executive's Role in Knowledge Management can help senior managers set sensible, yet aggressive, expectations and goals for a KM initiative and help KM practitioners who must establish a compelling business case to gain senior-level support.

For those who grasp the potential of their organizations' knowledge assets and want to develop strategies for leveraging them, this book can act as a guidebook. For those who are actively involved in crafting their organization's knowledge-based business strategy, this book offers the perspectives of leaders who have faced this challenge and succeeded. For those who want to use knowledge and learning to support existing core competencies, as well as create new ones, this book offers excellent examples. Most importantly, this book is for senior managers who lead by example and want to adapt successful approaches that will result in significant gains.

With examples from Ford Motor Co., the World Bank, IBM Corp., Caterpillar Inc., NASA, Best Buy Co. Inc., Schlumberger Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals Inc., Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc., Xerox Corp., and more, this book draws on APQC's years of research and pares down the information to the core KM principles and proven practices, with an unwavering focus on the bottom line.

What others are saying about The Executive's Role in Knowledge Management:

Nobody has more knowledge than Carla O'Dell and APQC about how to make knowledge management pay off. If knowledge is important to your business--and isn't that true everywhere?--you can't afford not to manage it. This book goes well beyond theory, with tangible measures, real-world examples of financial gains, and a frank discussion of what elements of KM implementation will cost.--Thomas H. Davenport, president's distinguished professor, Babson College, and Accenture Fellow

As you move down the path from knowledge sharing to being knowledge-driven as an organization, the lessons learned by APQC in their research of best practices in more than 300 organizations are invaluable in providing guideposts for executives to lead their organizations forward. You could not have a better guide to the future. --Robert H. Buckman, former president of Buckman Laboratories International Inc.

The advice in this book is based on almost a decade of research conducted by Carla O’Dell and the American Productivity & Quality Center. Under O’Dell’s direction, APQC has conducted research and KM projects with more than 300 organizations since 1995. KM authority and APQC president Carla O’Dell is also co-author of Knowledge Management and Stages of Implementation, from APQC’s popular Passport to Success series, as well as the very successful If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice (Free Press, 1998).

Paige Leavitt, co-author, has written a number of guidebooks for APQC, including Solving Problems in Schools and Capturing Critical Knowledge From a Shifting Work Force.