The Answer to Your Questions Is Probably Inside Your Company

January 8, 2010 by Mary Adams

There was a great story in the NY Times awhile back about the new co-CEO at Motorola, Sanjay Jha, Strategy of New Chief at Motorola Appears Poised to Pay Off. It explained:

Looking back, Mr. Jha said that Motorola was in worse shape than he knew when he took the job, largely because of a dysfunctional management culture that missed the shift in consumer preferences from phones intended primarily for talking to those that do nearly everything a computer can do. The company’s engineering talent, which had once developed great phones, remained intact, he said.

As luck would have it, one of those engineers, Rick Osterloh, grabbed Mr. Jha just as he stepped off the stage at that first town meeting in August 2008. Mr. Jha had mentioned Google’s Android operating system for smartphones. Mr. Osterloh rushed the stage to tell him he was working on an Android phone in Motorola’s Silicon Valley outpost that would bring together text messages, e-mail and social-network updates.

By the end of that week, Mr. Osterloh was sitting on the corporate jet, flying with Mr. Jha back to California and explaining the Android concept in detail.

I don’t know about you but we see this kind of thing all the time–and not just at big companies.

This kind of story is a great lesson in one of the crucial management principals of the knowledge era:

Your intangible capital resides in your people, your processes and your networks. Success in the knowledge era demands that managers find way for knowledge to flow from the bottom up (from your people) and the outside in (from your partners).

The industrial model in which we all grew up emphasized knowledge flows from the top down and the inside out. That has to change. You cannot optimize your intangible capital without the “reverse” knowledge flows.