Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom

Not All Knowledge Is Created Equal

Deep smarts are the engine of any organization-as well as the essential value that individuals build over their careers. Distinct from I.Q., this type of expertise consists of practical wisdom: accumulated knowledge, know-how, and intuition gained through extensive experience. How do such smarts develop? And what happens when people with deep smarts leave a particular job-or the organization? Can any of their smarts be transferred? Should they be?

Basing their conclusions on a multiyear research project, Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap argue that cultivating and managing deep smarts are critical parts of any leader's job. The authors draw on examples from firms of all sizes and types to illustrate the connection between deep smarts and organizational viability and continuous innovation.

Leonard and Swap describe the origins and limits of deep smarts and outline processes for cultivating and leveraging them across the organization. Developing an experience repertoire and receiving strategic guidance from wise coaches can help individuals move up the ladder of expertise from novice to master.

Addressing a topic of increasing importance as the Boomer generation retires, Deep Smarts challenges leaders to take a hands-on approach to managing the experience-based knowledge shaping the future of their organizations.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

An exciting read for the knowledge management junkie, 2006-08-31
For as long as anyone can remember leaders have been struggling to describe and to manage a mysterious kind of knowledge that people cannot readily pass on to others. It has been called wisdom, tribal knowledge, and tacit knowledge. Authors Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap put this elusive kind of expertise in an organizational context and call it deep smarts.

One of the best ways to describe deep smarts is to provide an example of what it can do. They write, "When knowledge is fragmented, it takes deep smarts to aggregate it, make sense of it, see the relevant patterns, and act on it." So deep smarts is what it takes to define a path through confusion by sensing the connections in a blizzard of information. Wouldn't we all like to have that ability and have it flourish in our organizations?

Deep Smarts, the book, stands out among its peers in the rapidly growing field of knowledge management books on the strength of several virtues that are expressed in the subtitle. The authors show the reader how to cultivate and transfer enduring business wisdom, with `how to' being one of the key elements.

Cultivating deep smarts in an organization requires serious commitment from a manager. The manager must study it enough to understand its nature. It also requires a big investment in other people in order to give them the opportunity to develop deep smarts, which is to say, to move beyond ordinary levels of competence. Finally, the manager must maintain an environment that supports learning rather than stifling it. This means maintaining an environment of candor, fairness, and mutual respect. Anything less stifles learning and discourages the development of deep smarts.

Swap and Leonard provide an abundance of rather specific guidance on the `how' component. They do not leave the reader to invent the implementation process. The tasks they prescribe are not easy, however, and this is why the skillful development of deep smarts is rarely accomplished by organizations.

There are plenty of books on knowledge management, but Deep Smarts fills a unique niche for the working manager who faces the real life challenge of building a smarter organization by virtue of providing a helpful vocabulary, a useful conceptual framework, and real life examples of success and failure in knowledge management. This is a "best-of-class" book for both the scholar and the practitioner who is accountable for the bottom line.



0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Deep smarts make Good to Great happen, 2006-04-17
This book uses great examples to explain the value of different levels of smarts. In the ancient hunting and gathering age, it's almost impossible for a hunter to get 1000 times of games more than his peer did. But in the Internet age, an expert programmer can easily make 1000 times of IT performance higher than her peer does.

The related critical issues come along: (1) How to distinguish different levels of knowledge? (2) How to find the right knowledge workers with required level of intelligence? (3) How to develop the deep smarts and their knowledge masters? (4) Finally, how to use those deep smarts to accomplish the organization's goals?

In the future editions, I would like to see the authors elaborate more on item (3) and (4) which are lightly exploited at the current version. Even for the item (1): how to distinguish different levels of knowledge? I think more quantitative and qualitative analysis may be introduced for better measurement and clarification. For example, how to measure the productivity of the software programmer is a tough task. (It's certainly not measured by the lines of code written per day.) In the senior corporate management and politics, it becomes extremely hard for rigorous performance measurement.

In a word, the deep smarts make good to great happen. The level 5 leaders in the greatest companies deploy and enable their organizations' deep smarts and constantly out-perform the rest. Therefore, it would be great worth exploring the general mechanism of deep smarts.



2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Learning Influenced by Beliefs, 2005-12-07
This book is in the area of Knowledge Management. Similar to many other business books, it is based on empirical research performed by the authors.

The authors first define what they mean by "deep smarts" through reviewing different levels of expertise. Then they introduce the main thesis of the book. Expertise is acquired by an individual through active knowledge building. This includes getting first-hand experience and the transfer of knowledge from coaches or through other means. However, in such a process, the amount of knowledge that is actually internalized is also influenced by one's own beliefs and other people via their social influences.

The authors have led me to a significant understanding of why it is so hard for some people to learn, despite the fact that, their need for the relevant knowledge is very obvious already. Important factors include their lack of knowledge receptors and the knowledge to which they are exposed being contrary to their existing beliefs and assumptions.

This book is a great help to coaches, teachers, and consultants in helping them learn more effective methods of transferring knowledge to their students or clients in various situations.



6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

By far the most useful, insightful book I've read in years., 2005-05-03
By far the most useful and insightful book I've read in years. It changed the way I think about my organization and my career.

Leonard and Swap have shown that deep smarts, the experienced-based knowledge held by individuals in a firm are vital to an organization's survival as well as to an individual's success. I've heard much about the necessity of "cultivating talent" or "managing knowledge" without any real insight into what constitutes talent or what kind of knowledge is important. The result I've seen has been impractical (but often very expensive) efforts to codify any available organizational information without any sense of how valuable or accessible it is.

Leonard and Swap dig deeper into the real meaning of knowledge. Their research has identified what kind of knowledge creates competitive advantage, and more importantly, how leaders can cultivate and retain this knowledge. I don't know anyone in business who has not been confronted with the realization that vital experience has not been captured or passed on...when someone retires, leaves a position or leaves the company. And most of us have experienced a competitive threat based on superior expertise. But the solutions proposed usually aren't based on an understanding of how people actually learn (rather than how we wish they would) and don't often result in the development of judgment and wisdom. This book gave me a whole new way of thinking about expertise and how to leverage it. Deep Smarts also spoke to me on a personal level. I found their suggestions for how to build personal deep smarts an extremely useful approach to my own career development.

I also appreciate that this book is grounded in rigorous research. Based on hundreds of interviews, it provides the kind of insight that comes from real people, managing real organizations. It is no wonder their suggestions and guidance are so actionable. For once, I feel like a management book has been written for managers! This book is a must for anyone serious about the reality of managing knowledge assets and intellectual capital.



1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

You don't have to be an expert to learn how to share knowhow, 2005-05-03
In Deep Smarts, the authors demonstrate a brilliant capacity for translating complex concepts into practical ideas for managers. Finally, here is book that addresses directly some of the challenges in knowledge transfer at a critical time for professions in all sectors of society. The authors tackle a very difficult problem: how to understand expertise; but then they go the additional step and discuss how to develop useful practices for sharing expertise across organizations. Leonard and Swap show how and why expertise can and should be captured before knowledge 'walks out the door.' The book aggregates and synthesizes years of primary and secondary academic research, but you wouldn't necessarily know that unless you took a close look at the extensive citations. In addition, there are many case examples that tell the story in a compelling and highly readable manner.

Some may see this as a book for HR, training&development, or knowledge management... it is for all three of these domains and the one that ties them together: strategy. As expertise is more greatly valued as the enduring resource for sustainable economic advantage, knowledge-based organizations will turn increasingly to their communities of practice, in which resides the expertise that is the wellspring of innovation.

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