阅读以纪念为名之一：Best practice and beyond: Knowledge strategies

Leanway

Value created by knowledge is often not captured. Five accounts of knowledge strategies.

Jonathan D. Day and James C. Wendler

1998 Number 1

The business press is filled with accounts of the power of knowledge to reshape corporate fortunes. Conferences on knowledge management are announced with increasing frequency. Yet a closer look at the prescriptions on offer reveals that much of the discussion is about knowledge in the narrowest sense: the use of processes and technology to foster the spread of best practices across a company. 开宗明义，提纲挈领。正如历史上武器和战术应用的相互适应的战例一样，企业中的技术和组织形式（流程）也有着相互适应的关系：制约或者促进。

Here, we explore the practical implications of a wider view of knowledge for strategy formulation. As traditional structural advantages decay and more products and services enter the global competitive arena, strategies formed around knowledge can change the game and open up new paths to profitability. 技术只是知识的一个狭义上的说法，知识涵盖更多。传统的组织架构已不适应知识的快速广泛传播和应用。

The knowledge difference

Knowledge is an asset unlike any other. The first step in framing a knowledge strategy is to understand four characteristics in particular: 知识也是企业资产，它有着自己的特征。

Extraordinary leverage and increasing returns. Most assets are subject to diminishing returns, but not knowledge. The bulk of the fixed cost in knowledge products usually lies in creation rather than in manufacturing or distribution. Once the knowledge has been created, the initial development cost can be spread across rising volumes. 嗯，咨询公司自己道出了真相。正是从这个方面来说，俺不相信咨询公司能完完全全地帮助企业，对得住企业付的钱那已是最高标准。无庸讳言，咨询公司本身是很优秀的，但他们不会无私地发放自己的DNA，花钱也不行，努力学习加自强最重要。

Network effects can emerge as knowledge is used by more and more people. These users can simultaneously benefit from knowledge and increase its value as they add to, adapt, and enrich the knowledge base. In traditional industrial economics, assets decline in value as more people use them. By contrast, knowledge assets can grow in value as they become a standard on which others can build. 种子很重要，便如自然界的结晶现象。

Today’s specialist skill becomes tomorrow’s ticket to play as fields of knowledge grow deeper and more complex

Fragmentation, leakage, and the need for refreshment. As knowledge grows, it tends to branch and fragment. Today’s specialist skill becomes tomorrow’s ticket to play as fields of knowledge grow deeper and more complex. While knowledge assets that become standards can grow more and more valuable, others, like expiring patents or former trade secrets, can become less valuable as they are widely shared. A successful company must therefore continually refresh its knowledge base. The rapid and effective re-creation of knowledge can represent a substantial source of competitive advantage. 这里同样有一个“可持续性”的概念。

Uncertain value. The value of an investment in knowledge is often difficult to estimate. Results may not come up to expectations; conversely, they may lead to extraordinary knowledge development. Equally, a fruitful series of knowledge advances, each building on the last, may suddenly and unaccountably come to a halt. 无形与有形，数量和质量，这其中都有着某种关联，Brain-storming的原则很好地说明了这一点。

Uncertain value-sharing. Even when knowledge investments create considerable value, it is hard to predict who will capture the lion’s share of it. There are three reasons for this.

First, much knowledge is embedded in people’s minds, and so cannot be owned and controlled in the way that plant and equipment can. To be sure, some can be codified, but the most valuable knowledge is often tacit. People know more than they can say, and are in a strong position to lay claim to the value they generate. 想起了一个典故：徐庶进曹营 —— 一言不发。

Second, knowledge can be a difficult asset to trade. Intellectual property rights are hard to enforce when a knowledge artifact such as a report or a software program can be readily copied without detection. Who owns knowledge developed jointly by several parties may be difficult to determine, even for the law courts. “大而化之”这个原则这时起作用了。

Third, the need to cooperate with partners to generate knowledge and the unpredictability of the results mean that often the exact distribution of value cannot be agreed. The value realized by the partners may differ even if each holds identical unrestricted rights to the knowledge.

These four characteristics make investing in knowledge assets a tricky business. Traditional models of industry structure and conduct are an inadequate basis for strategy because they do not help managers understand how value will be created, or who will capture most of it. 世易时移，变法宜矣！

Leanway

Knowledge opportunities

Despite the difficulties, some companies have developed and implemented powerful knowledge-based strategies. Here, we examine five of them.

McDonald’s: Developing and transferring best practices

In many service industries, the ability to identify best practices and spread them across a dispersed network of locations is a key driver of value. Such a strategy can create powerful brands that are continually refreshed as knowledge about how to serve customers better travels across the network. In these circumstances, it may be all but impossible to tell whether value has been created by the brand or by knowledge. The two are inseparable. How much does McDonald’s brand depend on, say, network-wide knowledge of how best to cook french fries? 在现在这样的时代，产品趋同，设备趋同（技术和工艺流程大多固着于有形的设备），物流的全球化，最终导致知识成为更重要的竞争力要素。

The thoroughness of McDonald’s best practice approach is legendary. By the time restaurant managers attend Hamburger University in Illinois, they will have received between 1,500 and 3,000 hours of regional training. KFC与McDonald’s，百事与可口，相映成趣，值得注意。有朋友在可口，说好讨厌百事，象牛皮糖一样紧贴着你，你有啥它学啥。国内的略有其形，如Huawei与ZTE，移动和联通，等等。

The company also gets comparable outlets to work together to benchmark performance, set aspirations, and make product mix and service decisions. These peer groups are supported by a real-time information system that transmits sales to headquarters hourly. Thanks to the system, the location of group members is immaterial; one group could include branches in Warsaw and Rio de Janeiro. At the same time, the system enables corporate headquarters to keep a tight grip on the valuable knowledge that links its outlets. 系统是真实世界在某种程度上的映射。

However, McDonald’s is pursuing an essentially centralist model in which the corporation defines rigid standards not only for its products but for the processes that deliver them. The company’s recent squabbles with franchisees over the introduction of the Arch Deluxe product and the 55¢ sandwich promotion illustrates the degree to which this formula can conflict with entrepreneurialism. Recent moves suggest that McDonald’s may devolve more decision making to franchisees and seek to learn more from them, particularly about new business development.

Enron: Creating a new industry from embedded knowledge

Some companies succeed in defining new industries by exploiting knowledge opportunities that are overlooked in existing products and processes.

Until the early 1990s, Enron was a gas pipeline transmission company like many others. But its managers realized that embedded in what appeared to be a commodity gas business was valuable information about product flow, supply, and demand. They established Enron Capital and Trade Resources to exploit this information through an innovative range of risk management contracts. The enterprise helped Enron grow its sales by 7 percent per year and its shareholder returns by 27 percent per year between 1988 and 1995. 这时候再把这样的老文章翻出来，McKinsey需要勇气啊！开了天窗还是咋的？成也萧何，败也萧何啊！

Monsant Shaping corporate strategy around knowledge

Until the mid 1990s, Monsanto encompassed a $3 billion chemicals group and a $5 billion life sciences group. The latter, with its agriculture, nutrition, and healthcare products, was an innovation-based business, while the chemicals group, with its fiber, coating and adhesive, polymer modifier, and fire retardant products, was focused on best practice. Success for life sciences involved cultivating a small number of skilled scientists and managing a network of biotechnology partners; for chemicals, it was a matter of execution at low cost and high quality.

Either group might have succeeded on its own. But the knowledge strategies of the two groups were entirely dissimilar; so were the staff who executed them. Recognizing the difficulty of pursuing two incompatible strategies simultaneously, Monsanto spun off the chemicals group to concentrate on the life sciences business. 限于知识背景，俺对这个例子莫名其妙。

Oticon: Fostering and commercializing innovation

By the late 1980s, Oticon, the Danish manufacturer of hearing aids, had seen its market share and profitability decline as competitors introduced more advanced and cheaper products. When Lars Kolind became CEO in 1990, he realized that technological innovation and time to market would be critical success factors. He set out to create an environment that would promote the flow of knowledge and encourage entrepreneurial behavior.

Organization charts, offices, job descriptions, and formal roles were abandoned. Employees were expected to choose their own projects and work in fast-moving cross-functional teams. The office building was redesigned to enhance communication between design and manufacturing. Kolind banned paper from the office, believing that it bred bureaucracy. 北欧国家的企业有着某种共性，但俺也观察到一个北欧企业的美国化的过程。

These changes produced dramatic results. Return on equity climbed from the low single digits in the late 1980s to over 25 percent in the 1990s as Oticon developed and rapidly commercialized innovations such as the digital hearing aid.

Netscape: Creating a standard by releasing proprietary knowledge

In 1997, Netscape started to see a rapid decline in its share of the Internet browser market as Microsoft’s Explorer gained share at the expense of its Communicator and Navigator products. In March 1998, it made the source code (fundamental programming instructions) of its browser products available, at no cost and under generous licensing provisions, to anyone who visits its Internet Web site. The company is apparently giving away knowledge that cost millions of dollars to generate — knowledge that most companies would guard jealously. 数十年的IT产业史浓缩了数百年的工业史乃至数千年的组织史。

In taking this step, Netscape is betting on two things. First, by making its products widely available, it hopes to secure its share of a complementary product: software for the servers that browser programs access. Second, it hopes that millions of software developers will adapt and enhance its products, producing variants such as browsers for children. 时光飞逝，弹指间八年过去，Netscape的“首义”之举终于开始撼动MS的根基。

While it is too early to tell whether these bets will pay off, we might consider the strategy pursued by Incyte Pharmaceutical, which achieved a market capitalization of over $600 million in six years by licensing its gene sequencing knowledge non-exclusively to large pharmaceutical companies. In so doing, it gained access to the knowledge of its partners and created a standard platform for the provision of all genomic data that becomes increasingly valuable as more companies use it.

In the same way, Netscape is betting that the efforts of many programmers outside the company will turn its products into a valuable standard. By contrast with Incyte, and with other software firms that make source code available to selected developers under carefully negotiated arrangements, most of Netscape’s developers will be unknown to the company, at least initially.

Leanway

Creating knowledge strategies

Are these isolated examples, or can knowledge strategies be developed systematically? We believe they can if companies follow four crucial steps:

Ask diagnostic questions. To find out where and how knowledge matters in the business, pose questions like these:

△If our operating margins fell sharply — perhaps as the result of a price war or an irrational competitor’s actions — do we have service or information businesses that could remain profitable? 微软一定经常问自己这样的问题。公司已经上了规模，再要做大做强，多元化是必由之路。

△Are exciting ideas emerging within the company but failing to be commercialized?

△If ideas are not reaching the market, what incentives, structures, or management processes seem to be blocking them?

△If our company has more money than ideas, are there opportunities to form partnerships with companies that may be more "in the flow" of innovative ideas? 一个很好的视角 —— 把ideas和money并列起来了！

△Could we cut costs, reduce time to market, improve customer service, or increase margins by sharing best practices more effectively? Could our best practices be applied to the activities of competitors or related firms? If so, should we consider acquisitions or joint ventures?

△Is the "not invented here" syndrome so strong that we are missing attractive business opportunities? Would a broader surface area, achieved through more contact with a wider range of innovative companies, increase our value?

Understand the implications of knowledge for organizational design. Because of the characteristics of knowledge assets described above, classic organization designs may not work in a knowledge environment. The need to manage tacit knowledge, for instance, imposes a natural limit on the size of operating units. 信息化大师James Martin对此的论述更为充分和生动，Tom Peters提出的Professional Service Provider的概念也很好。

IDEO, the industrial design firm, has some 300 professionals worldwide, but operates a total of ten offices (including four in the Palo Alto/San Francisco Bay area alone) in order that none should have more than 50 people. Similarly, the Swedish software consultancy WM-data employs 3,800 people but stipulates that there be no more than 50 to a unit. 这种实践背后藏着某种实验心理学的理论？

The value of a knowledge business can sometimes be boosted by actions that might appear to destroy value

Adjust the company’s external posture and conduct. The fragmenting nature of knowledge and the possibility of increasing returns means that the value of a knowledge business can sometimes be boosted by actions that might appear to destroy value. To the extent that information (codified knowledge) can create standards, a company might choose to give it away, as Netscape does, or sell it at the cost of transmission so as to tie customers in to other, more profitable knowledge services. In some cases, companies will elect to embed service businesses within traditional manufacturing businesses. 旧有的体制倘若不能包容新生的力量，这种力量只能裂变，诸如Lucent 之于AT&T, Adobe之于Xerox。

Measure and monitor knowledge. The tacit and "soft" nature of knowledge businesses might suggest that knowledge development cannot be measured. A growing body of literature and experience suggests otherwise, and shows that effective, credible measurement systems can be a powerful means of driving a knowledge strategy forward. Simple financial measures are unlikely to be enough. 财务指标体系是用来衡量企业财富的，当财富的内涵变化了，旧有的衡量指标也得随需而变。

WM-data monitors the utilization of its consulting personnel week by week, as well as tracking the profit and value added per revenue-earning staff member. But it also measures longer-term indicators: the stability of its workforce, the average age of personnel, the stability and longevity of the customer base, and the development of competence in its knowledge workers. 有了观念，接着制度化的指标体系。

These four steps must be iterative and parallel rather than linear. Knowledge is so dependent on individuals that a rigid distinction between strategy and organization is inappropriate. In practice, successful knowledge strategies involve almost every aspect of a company’s organizational design. They are therefore a matter for chief executives and senior managers, not a technical issue confined to heads of R&D and corporate information. 第二次在严肃文章里看到“rigid”一词，所谓英雄所见略同，信哉。有形产品的设计有着一整套原则，如何更有效地组织最具灵动性的人更是如此了。

About the Authors

Jonathan Day is a principal and Jim Wendler is a consultant in McKinsey’s London office.

Copyright © 1992-2005 McKinsey & Company, Inc.

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