Epic Think Tank

Blending Learning and Knowledge Management

8. Value based management and Sven's men

Value Based Management (VBM), or Managing for Value, is a consulting model that focuses corporate decision-making on particular metrics that create shareholder value. It has shown spectacular results for Lloyds TSB among others, and holds great sway in certain corporate boardrooms.

VBM has much to say about how we should target our efforts in capturing excellence.

The basis of VBM consultancy is that in any organisation, a limited number of individuals and communities create a disproportionately large amount of the value in that organisation. Identify these people and communities, and that's where you invest.

With particular regard to learning and knowledge management, the VBM model might indicate that resources should go to the places within the organisation where there is the greatest thirst for knowledge, the highest levels of motivation and creativity. It might not be such a great idea to throw your training budget at remedial efforts to improve under-performing gas fitters, for example, when instead you could identify the authors of the book under the counter and devise systems and tools to facilitate them in their existing knowledge-sharing efforts.

The first lesson putative military strategists learn in military school (apparently) is always to send your reinforcements to the part of the battlefield where things are going best.

Parallels were drawn by our delegates between this rationale and the methods of Sven-Goran Eriksson, manager of England's national soccer team. Sven's game strategy relies on four or five stars within his team, each of whom has the capacity to produce an exceptional performance that can lift a whole team. Not all of them will be on top form for any given fixture, but with the right combination of star players, given appropriate support by other team members, there is a high probability of success (at least that's the theory).

This approach ought to give us clues to what we capture and re-use through learning and knowledge management. Clearly, we need to focus on the conditions and behaviours that produce exceptional performance.

So a VBM model for knowledge management, crudely put, might run as follows: identify your Sven's men, capture their expert practice and share it widely throughout the organisation.

Next>>

Intro: Sven, VBM and the book under the counter
1. The personality of knowledge
2. Making the tacit explicit
3. Learning from war stories
4. The book under the counter
5. The convergence of learning and knowledge management
6. Reward systems in the culture club
7. Modelling the tall poppy
8. The Odyssey as quality manual