Managing Knowledge across Borders

A recent discussion at The Braintrust Knowledge Management Group asked how cultural dimensions affect learning and knowledge sharing. I really like Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars' book "Building Cross-Cultural Competence" as a basis for understanding the challenges and opportunities you face and Hall's "Values Technology" approach to leveraging the differences.

This issue is further complicated, complexified and/or mitigated by the uniqueness of organizational, professional and departmental cultures—and don't forget that there are often nested subcultures to these as well. For example, Japanese are said to have a very unique and cohesive culture that permeates their corporate behaviors. However, when I studied Japanese corporations invested in the US, I found huge differences between, say, Hitachi, Ricoh, Toyota and Seiko. I also found every site and subsidiary had unique attributes based on the character of the managers, the local staff, the region, etc., as all these agents and communities "co-evolve."

I used to write extensively about such issues in global business and focused on the KM angle in a 1999 article for Knowledge Management magazine called "Managing Knowledge Across Borders," which I will repost here.

Basically, it boiled down to seven critical lessons:

1. Decide what kind of company you are: multi-national, international, global—or transnational.
2. Design KM systems that adapt to local conditions.
3. Map the cultural roadblocks.
4. Anticipate miscommunication in multicultural teams.
5. Optimize your corporate culture for knowledge sharing by understanding and leveraging inherent values.
6. It may be more important to be sensitive to corporate cultures than to ethnic cultures.
7. Be sensitive to the different subcultures of functional competencies within the corporation.

Comments

[Hobie Swan]

One way of being sensitive to different subcultures is to use documents that make the "official language" (whatever that may be) easier for your colleagues to understand.

One company I know of was racing to meet a deadline to bid for a very large contract. Instead of the usual 20-page document, they decided to send a mind-mapped version of their RFP to their global offices for feedback. The information was clear, concise and chunked, so it was either for their global employees that weren't native English speakers to quickly understand and respond to the RFP. The company said it got much more feedback than usual, won the contract, and has since made mind mapping a part of its corporate culture.

You can find out more about how maps help overcome language barriers at http://mapthink.blogspot.com/2010/02/using-mind-maps-to-lower-language.html

[Bill Proudfit]

The 'complete article' is the summary and the 7 lesson titles. Is this the complete article?

[Steve]

Sorry Bill, clicking "Managing Knowledge Across Borders” took you to the page summarizing the article, at the bottom of which was a link to the PDF, As follows:
http://reflexions.typepad.com/files/barth-1999-managing-knowledge-across-borders.pdf
Sorry for the confusion,
Steve