The Tribal Knowledge Paradigm

Book excerpt: This book evolved from our 30 years of work as consultants. We learned a lot. We did field research about best business practices. We then used the insights from this research to create a “mash-up,” a hybrid of the best. We found out how you get everyone involved to change a culture. We also made some major discoveries that we will report in this book. And we found out something that surprised us. Quite frankly, it is obvious but we were not aware of how big it really was. It was this. All people love to help improve their work. They love it even more when they get good feedback for their successful actions. We found that people really like “earned respect.” This is the respect that you get from a leader and co-workers. The respect that we note here is a two way street. It comes from the leader down to the employee. And it goes up from the employee to the leader. It goes both ways. It is “earned respect.” This is best achieved from a successfully completed action that advances a shared sense of purpose. Publicly acknowledged, “earned respect” is by far the strongest motivator. It is the premium.The surprise here was how this came about. As you read this book, you will see that the basis of our work was the War on Waste. We will talk about that later in the book. Suffice it to say, it was an approach to change that puts people in teams. These were teams with a very strong purpose. They were charted to find problems and boy were they good at it.These teams made over 10,000 rock solid proposals to the CEOs and their executive teams. The result was we were able to observe major increases of profits in just about all of our 150 engagements. And we were able to see employees getting respect as they got involved in innovation. This was pretty exciting stuff. And we are describing a paradigm that will create the Innovation Culture that is the foundation of the success of any company in today's market.