Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Suggestions for Better Knowledge Management
Review: Around the developed countries of the world, knowledge workers will be retiring at a fast clip in the next five to ten years. In some companies and organizations that have done poor succession planning or have been wracked by layoffs, this impact will come sooner. Professor DeLong has done a number of helpful case studies to document the harm that these retirements can cause, and describes the questions that organizations must ask themselves if they are to avoid dangerous and expensive knowledge gaps.

The bulk of the book is a detailed look at the effectiveness of knowledge management techniques in a variety of companies rather than a focus on the retirement problem. I was most impressed with the parts of the book that began with chapter 10 and continued to the end. If you have experience with the subject of knowledge management, you can skip the parts of the book that precede chapter 10. If you are new to the subject, you will find those parts helpful . . . but slowly developed. Stick with it. The material after chapter 9 is worth the wait.

The central reality of knowledge management is that few executives are very interested in it, many retiring workers don't really want to share what they know and many new workers don't feel like they have much to learn from older workers. I was delighted to see that Professor DeLong was familiar with those problems and makes a number of helpful suggestions for overcoming those psychological stalls to maintaining and improving knowledge.

Lest you think that the subject really isn't very important, you will be chilled to learn that there's a substantial risk of organizations forgetting how to disarm nuclear devices built in the 1970s and how to repair nuclear reactors built in the 1960s. In many other situations, life and death are at risk.

Pass it along!