by David W. DeLong
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Product Description
Executives today recognize that their firms face a wave of retirements over the next decade as the baby boomers hit retirement age. At the other end of the talent pipeline, the younger workforce is developing a different set of values and expectations, which creates new recruiting and employee retention issues. The evolution from an older, traditional, highly-experienced workforce to a younger, more mobile, employee base poses significant challenges, particularly when considered in the context of the long-term orientation towards downsizing and cost cutting. This is a solution-oriented book to address one of the most pressing management problems of the coming years: How do organizations transfer the critical expertise and experience of their employees before that knowledge walks out the door? It begins by outlining the broad issues and providing tools for developing a knowledge-retention strategy and function. It then goes on to outline best practices for retaining knowledge, including knowledge transfer practices, using technology to enable knowledge retention, retaining older workers and retirees, and outsourcing lost capabilities.
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Average Customer Review:
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Worth Considering as a Future Career Choice, 2007-03-13
I'm not much of a fan of management consultant books as I generally find them quite faddish. They usually state that there is a problem, enter a few amusing anecdotes that illustrate what they mean and follow up with some suggested solutions. In that sense this book is no different, but far closer to the Tom Peters academic style than the "One Minute Manager"
However the problem that it discusses struck a resonant chord in me. Years ago I viewed a tape from Texas Instruments that talked about capturing the knowledge of a distillation column engineer for Campbell's soup in a expert system. The gentleman was retiring soon, and the company didn't know what he knew and felt the best approach was to build a system that modelled his expertise. What I never found out was how successful the approach was in the end. (This story is not in the book.)
The basic problem is that through retirement and attrition key knowlege in many organizations disappears. No one knows who knows what nor the value of that knowledge before it is gone. The problem is exascerbated by the huge lump of the baby boomers when they retire. The anecdotes include NASA no longer knowing how to get to the moon any more using Saturn V technology (the plans are lost), Sandia labs needing to retain the knowledge of how to build, test and dismantle nuclear weapons, given that they haven't built or tested a weapon in years, the cost rediscovering wiring and conduits in building that we no longer have the blueprints of. The solution lies in identification, sharing, managing and storytelling. Various success stories are brought out to support the points. Strategies such as Communities of Practice and the U.S. Army's AAR (After Action Review): 1) What was supposed to happen 2) What actually happened 3) Why were there differences 4) What can we learn for next time) are covered.
What de Long doesn't deal with is the cost of collecting this knowledge vs the value received on a per item basis. Localized cost for globalized benefit usually plays poorly in most organizations.
Still the book is well written and enjoyable. I've always been one to define my own job functions. It suggests to me that there is a potential role in any organization as a professional liason between groups and generations of expertise - a possible career choice. The book emphasises the value that is contributed by individuals in the workplace and gets you thinking about the need to transmit the legacy not only of things done well but of things done poorly.
A book that inspires that kind of introspection is worth picking up and reading.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Protecting the Eroding Treasure of Knowledge, 2005-10-29
The generation of workers that is moving into retirement now-the Traditionalists, followed by the huge (76.4 million) Baby Boomer cohort-has experienced an unprecedented era of change and growth. Workers in this period have typically stayed with one employer for many years, accumulating experience, continuity, and a wealth of knowledge that is principally captured within the individual. Now, as these workers retire, they're taking that invaluable knowledge with them; it's not being captured effectively to be used by successors. This loss is potentially a tremendous risk and cost for employers and for society.
The book, written by a a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Age Lab, is organized into three sections. The opening chapters explain the high cost of losing intellectual capital. The author provides an abundance of delicious examples of how the departure of workers with unique, uncaptured knowledge and experience will wreak havoc in practically every environment. He certainly makes his case, and maybe even overdoes it. I felt, at times, that I was getting bogged down in an almost repetitious litany of exposure to the problem.
Part two takes us into evaluating knowledge retention practices. Readers will gain insights into developing the infrastructure and the process of preserving what people have absorbed, but not recorded or passed along to others. Again, DeLong presents a large volume of information, examples, and case studies-so much material that it seems to get in the way of the message. The small type size and book design make the book even more difficult to read. The content is strong, but the presentation was not holding my attention. I found my eyes glazing over on a number of occasions as I drifted, then pulled myself back to the message.
The final section of the book moves us into implementation, again with example after example of what various companies are doing to protect their intellectual and operational knowledge. There is unquestionably a tremendous amount of value in these pages; it's just a bit difficult to draw it out without some serious concentration.
The book concludes with a strong section of notes and a comprehensive index.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
 Lost Knowledge--A must read, 2005-05-26
Lost Knowledge-a review
I enjoyed Lost Knowledge immensely. I am not a corporate manager,
but I found the book's insights and suggestions interesting, amusing and valuable. It's also incredibly readable. The anecdotes and stories are clever and compelling. The chapter dealing with the transfer of "explicit knowledge" got me thinking again about a woman I had known, the assistant to the head of an important organization, who had worked with him for several decades. She knew everything about anything. One day she was suddenly hit by a bus and killed and all her knowledge went with her. It took three people to replace her and even then...
The chapter on transferring "tacit" knowledge was also right on target. I didn't realize, until I turned my business over to colleagues, just how much of what I did (dealing with vendors, clients, buyers, employees) was either instinctual or learned and nowhere written down. This book also made me reexamine the current spate of industrial mishaps and accidents. I wonder how much of what happens (train derailments, chemical spills, etc) are a result of what DeLong suggests is departed experience.
The author identifies many hidden traps and challenges of lost knowledge and explains them clearly. Like the knowledge it so earnestly beseeches us to protect, this book should be kept and revisited as questions and challenges arise. If I were running a business again, I would consider this required reading.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Fascinating and Usefull, 2005-03-25
This book deals with a fascinating and complex issue facing organizations today. It's full of compelling examples that show how losing knowledge can seriously hurt organizational performance. DeLong provides a comprehensive approach to the challenges posed by boomer retirements, and the solutions he describes will be very helpful to managers looking for a way to attack this growing problem.
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent Suggestions for Better Knowledge Management, 2004-08-28
Around the developed countries of the world, knowledge workers will be retiring at a fast clip in the next five to ten years. In some companies and organizations that have done poor succession planning or have been wracked by layoffs, this impact will come sooner. Professor DeLong has done a number of helpful case studies to document the harm that these retirements can cause, and describes the questions that organizations must ask themselves if they are to avoid dangerous and expensive knowledge gaps.
The bulk of the book is a detailed look at the effectiveness of knowledge management techniques in a variety of companies rather than a focus on the retirement problem. I was most impressed with the parts of the book that began with chapter 10 and continued to the end. If you have experience with the subject of knowledge management, you can skip the parts of the book that precede chapter 10. If you are new to the subject, you will find those parts helpful . . . but slowly developed. Stick with it. The material after chapter 9 is worth the wait.
The central reality of knowledge management is that few executives are very interested in it, many retiring workers don't really want to share what they know and many new workers don't feel like they have much to learn from older workers. I was delighted to see that Professor DeLong was familiar with those problems and makes a number of helpful suggestions for overcoming those psychological stalls to maintaining and improving knowledge.
Lest you think that the subject really isn't very important, you will be chilled to learn that there's a substantial risk of organizations forgetting how to disarm nuclear devices built in the 1970s and how to repair nuclear reactors built in the 1960s. In many other situations, life and death are at risk.
Pass it along!
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