Intellectual Inheritance


“Each night during a recent sales trip to Rio de Janeiro, Black & Veatch Senior Vice-President Michael Perry would review the day's progress over dinner with several junior staffers accompanying him. After watching Perry in action, they had plenty of questions: Why had he worked toward a compromise when the Brazilian client clearly wasn't going to budge? How was he accounting for the different cultural perspectives of the British, Japanese, and South Korean businessmen who were potential partners in the deal? …

“The 59-year-old executive had done something that will probably prove even more valuable for the company in coming years, after his retirement: He instilled some of his specialized negotiating skills in his would-be successors.

“Knowledge handoffs like this are becoming more common at companies, motivated by the concern that droves of retiring baby boomers will mean huge losses in irreplaceable intellectual capital. ‘When people leave organizations today, they are potentially taking with them knowledge that's critical to the future of the business,’ says David DeLong, a business consultant...

“Meeting periodically over a nine-month period, representatives from Black & Veatch, American Express, Procter & Gamble, and six other companies compared notes on the best ways to facilitate a knowledge handoff from one generation of workers to the next.

“Many companies realize that they are on the verge of losing stores of knowledge but don't know where to begin efforts to retain it. ‘Focus on specific business needs,’ says Kent Greenes… an independent knowledge-management consultant who has worked with companies like Hess and Northrop Grumman…

“Experts agree that, over the coming years, companies that have these programs in place somewhere in their organization will gain a competitive edge. ‘Leveraging the collective knowhow of organizations is really going to pay for itself now, as we're approaching complex problems and going into new markets and working globally,’ says Greenes. ‘Wherever it has been difficult to do things, that's when you're going to see knowledge management come to the fore.’”


(“The Knowledge Handoff; How corporations are scrambling to tap the expertise of baby boomers before they retire.” Douglas MacMillan. businessweek.com: August 27, 2008)


IMPLICIT, INTANGIBLE, INHERENT in the touch, sense and feel of the experienced leader lie insight and understanding.

Can that be transferred? Will they listen? Will they hear? Can they comprehend beyond their years? Will we connect?

Touch the heart; reach the mind. Endow the future.

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