Creating a knowledge culture



Knowledge is now the lifeblood of all companies. Don’t confuse it with information.


FEBRUARY 2001 • Susanne Hauschild, Thomas Licht, and Wolfram Stein










Ask a group of senior executives if they regard knowledge management as very important to the success of a company. Most will enthusiastically say that they do—a response befitting one of the trendiest topics in management circles.






Yet thinking that knowledge management is crucial and knowing what to do about it are very different. A McKinsey survey of 40 companies in Europe, Japan, and the United States showed that many executives think that knowledge management begins and ends with building sophisticated information technology systems.






Some companies go much further: they take the trouble to link all their information together and to build models that increase their profitability by improving processes, products, and customer relations. Such companies understand that true knowledge management requires them to develop ways of making workers aware of those links and goes beyond infrastructure to touch almost every aspect of a business.1






Because knowledge management is an increasingly essential component of innovation and value creation, we focused on two tasks—product development and order generation and fulfillment—as a way of identifying which companies in our survey were good knowledge managers. These tasks are the major contributors to the value a company generates. By using process performance...