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• Retaining Knowledge ( a challenge for the corporate world )

-By Vinay Dhanesha & Chirag Shah

In today’s competitive era and globalization, corporate world is facing many issues to cope up with and attain the desired growth year after year.

The emerging issues could be change in marketing strategy, ERP, CRM, HR related issues, Knowledge Management to name the few.

The most challenging issue faced by corporate world in today’s highly competitive era is RETAINING KNOWLEDGE to manage the desired growth, and corporate world is trying to find the best of the solutions and path for the same.

To understand the topic lets take a simple example –

One company’s Chairman and Managing Director is planning to expand his business by jumping into some other field, so for the same he appoints a CEO for that group company. He invests crores of rupees for the R & D and other developments in that group company. But the shock comes to the Chairman and Managing Director when the CEO quit the company and set up his own company in similar field. This could be considered an investment for a year in R & D and an Intellectual property, which could worth about more than 10 times then the investment. The Chairman and Managing Director had to accept it bitterly as his efforts by the way of sicking legal help or filing a case cannot come soon enough to save his dream.

When any Company lose it knowledge or the top management person then it ……

• Can leave a vacuum

• Can trade secrets

• Can poach other executives

• Can nullify strategies

What is the best the company can do…

• Can use succession plans

• Can use secrecy contracts

• Can digitise knowledge

• Can reduce "Star Power"

When from any company the top management departs, the company loses its intimate knowledge of processes, the little trade secrets that go undocumented, knowledge of specific market needs…which is definitely of very high value to company’s success prospects.

 No matter how professional and systemised business operations get, companies lose a lot when they lose genuine talent. More often  than not, this is because genuine talent is independent of corporate systems.

Then what is the probable solutions ?

The corporate world follows their own different policies and strategy to cope with such situations..

In some company “The process starts at the time of hiring. Senior personnel has to sign contract that they will not join competitors or lure talent away from us for a specified period.

Some rely on constant feedback and monitoring systems which can give warning signals so that there is enough time for damage control. Efforts can be made to retain the person or ensure that the departure of that person has no significant impact.

Some also believe on the policy that no single person should be allowed to become a star. There should be multiple touch points within organization in each departments. Also documentation should be critical ensuring each details of the projects handled, decision taken and the information and reasoning on which these were taken. This can be made a part of Knowledge Management Computer system. Such e-documentation which shorten the learnig curve of the next incumbent, who get the ready access to the database and decision making algorithms of the departing executive.

KM systems are the most promising tool that can be deployed to combat top-level departures. KM system maps the management’s collective mind, to the extent possible, for digital storage. KM ensures that knowledge is not centralised and is channelised companywide, on a need-to-know basis.

But in the end, recruiting the people with high integrity is the only foolproof mechanism to pre-empt knowledge spills. Appointment letters do have protective clauses, and there’s a whole lot of other policing that can be done. But before any of theat, businesses need to ask themselves this : what happened to loyalty???

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