Thirty-five thousand years ago, at the base of a cliff in what is now southeastern France, members of a nomadic hunting tribe crawled through a dark, wet, and narrow passage into a cavern. Holding crude torches before them, they groped deeper into the damp gloom, past the evidence of bears that had made the cave their home. They built a small fire to light the space, and after mixing clays and water for their medium, they painted depictions of the creatures they often encountered stalking the hills and river bottoms around them. Leopards, lions, bison, rhinoceroses, and bears were not the animals they hunted, but the animals that threatened them.

These artists, in a chamber both frightening and barely accessible, were recording what they knew, for what reasons we 21st-century humans can't be sure. But as humans, we attribute some purpose to their deeds: to appease their gods, to appeal to the spirits of their predators, or maybe to initiate their young men as hunters.

Clearly, those artists—possibly our direct ancestors—were intentionally passing along experiential knowledge of value to their tribe and their apprentices at the dawn of human civilization. We can imagine the conversations that took place around these pictures, in the cave itself, and around the tribal campfire. In the process of creating their message pictures, they were unwittingly leaving evidence for us, the future descendants they could never have envisioned.

Knowledge sharing has become a natural part of our social behavior. Our ability to communicate defines our humanity, and our tendency is to tell each other what we know, especially when what we know is of interest to the other. Humans are also toolmakers and tool users. This book is about using the tools of the Internet to practice what we've always known how to do, but in the context of the organization rather than the family or tribe.

Figure 1.1. Lions and leopards and bears! Oh my! Recording wildlife sightings for the tribe in 33,000 B.C.

Panel of the Panther Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc. Photo courtesy of French Ministry of Culture and Communication, Régional Direction for Cultural Affairs—Rhone-Alpes region—Regional department of archeology

This is not a history book, but it uses examples from history to remind you, its readers, that knowledge sharing has defined our civilization. Communicating abstract ideas to one another has distinguished our species from all other animals. We've been innovating, testing, and practicing knowledge transfer for a long, long time, and much of what we'll describe in these pages is more natural to us than many organizations apparently realize.

In the context of present-day networked organizations, most managers are challenged in adapting natural conversational behaviors, which people have been refining at least since Paleolithic times, to communications media that, in the timeline of human history, appeared only moments ago. Certainly some adaptation is required, but resistance has become entrenched within the business climate that developed during more than a century of industrial expansion and technical advances. Fortunately, some of those technical advances are now able to foster a return to the "old ways" that proved themselves for all but the last little smidgen of human progress.

The Internet is today's cave wall where tens of millions of artists have now recorded their observations, experiences, learnings, and—perhaps less nobly— their sales pitches. The organization is still adjusting to its newfound ability to provide open access to the Net's information, entertainment, communication, and ideas within the work environment. Many organizations are still reluctant to provide that access because the excesses and abuses of the adolescent Internet have been so well publicized for business leaders to see.

No company wants its employees to spend their time at work surfing pornographic Web sites or wasting hours rambling in chat rooms. Yet, on the other side of the coin, examples that clearly demonstrate the benefits of allowing the workforce to collaborate socially through the Net and to use the Internet for valid research are often regarded as too anecdotal, too expensive, or too threatening to internal order, accountability, and efficiency.

The exchange of organizational knowledge through personal interaction on the Net has not yet been widely embraced because decision makers claim to lack proof that it is cost-effective. We will provide evidence that it is, but the following examples from history suggest that organizational leaders must be patient in adapting to this new global medium. After all, our ancestors learned cooperatively—through the glacially slow invention of progressively stronger media—for thousands of years. Now that media are developing so much faster than before, it shouldn't surprise us that change is outpacing our ability to keep up and make the best use of the latest and greatest technologies. This struggle to keep up applies on both the individual and organizational levels.

The pace of cultural change through history has, for the most part, been slow and incremental. But judging by the 1990s, we are now expected to adjust almost yearly to tremendous advances in our ability to communicate around the planet. Can organizations change their cultures to keep up with the torrid pace of technology and information?

Compared to any new medium before it, the Net has been adopted by the overall population (at least in the developed world) at a lightning pace, maybe too fast for most organizations to adapt their cultures to its peculiarities. Our recommendations in this book will focus on careful, step-by-step approaches to learning to use the Net as a meeting place for knowledge exchange. Most organizations must learn to crawl before they try to walk, or they're likely to tumble and assume, prematurely, that they're just not meant to walk.

We believe that all organizations are meant to walk and that they will benefit by learning to share knowledge through networked conversation. But we also believe that one can be too careful, too fearful of what might happen by taking the plunge. The Net's rewards often come through the unplanned magic of serendipity, as many advances in human knowledge seem to have done. The change in our ability to communicate as groups has happened, and it's not likely to be reversed. We should, therefore, make the best use possible of the technical advances we have created for ourselves and our world.

Many of today's most successful organizations and businesses have become humongous, hurried, and complex compared to any that we include in our brief summary of human history. It used to take a despot to manage large human forces and projects, but the old command-and-control hierarchical model is yielding, slowly but steadily, to the networked organization in direct response to the competitive (and collaborative) influence of today's new media. Managing in a networked environment is one of the skills we will describe in this book.

Given the size of organizations today and the tremendous reach of the Net, history hints persuasively that there may be an optimum size for communities that can effectively share knowledge and then have disproportionate influence. Within huge organizations, these naturally scaled collaborative groups need to be identified and leveraged. Groups small enough for all members to essentially know one another are less likely to be held back by inhibitions brought by the presence of strangers. The examples and guides we provide in this book will therefore be based on effectively scaled knowledge communities.

Though our focus is on conversational knowledge sharing using the new media of technical networks, we emphasize in this chapter that the purely social aspects of this practice are not new. Modern organizations don't have to reinvent knowledge networks; they've been under iterative development for countless generations. The current challenge is to adapt knowledge networks to the needs of the modern organization and to the new environment of Cyberspace.

When the paintings described earlier were discovered in Chauvet Cave near Avignon, France in 1994, they were hailed as some of the greatest early evidence of communication by visual images and of the cerebral capacity for associative thinking. As Robert Hughes explained, reporting on the discovery in Time magazine, "Art, at its root, is association—the power to make one thing stand for and symbolize another, to create the agreements by which some marks on a surface denote, say, an animal, not just to the mark-maker but to others."^[4] Making these symbols recognizable to others illustrates one crucial principle of knowledge networking: the use of a commonly understood language.

The choice of a cave as a location for displaying their art certainly had some reasoning behind it. Of course, we can't know for certain if caves were chosen to protect the paintings from the weather or to demonstrate the bravery of the warriors who had to enter the lair of the ferocious cave bear to paint and see them. Maybe the difficult entry and the inhospitably dark environment lent enough danger and mystery to the location to enhance its ritualistic purpose. Whatever the reason, knowledge was recorded, stored, and passed along in a dedicated space, another key element of good knowledge networking. The cave itself lent special importance to what the community learned from its contents.

Surely these paintings were created and preserved for some purpose beyond the quality of their art. Though we can recognize most of the animal forms, we can't understand the context of their creation. We may be the distant descendants of the cave painters, but the best we can do is guess that these paintings had meaning and solved problems for the clan. They could have created them to keep clan members safe, to keep them fed, or simply to allay their fears. In the lingo of modern knowledge management, the art in Chauvet Cave would be described as local knowledge—understood and appreciated by its immediate community but of no clear relevance to the rest of us. The cave paintings are thus like many of the facts and figures that corporations take care to preserve: of limited practical use to people who discover them once the originators are gone.

Our ancestors began writing some 5,000 years ago, recording events and transactions that made it possible for people of succeeding eras, including our own, to access some of what was known, understood, and believed about life and cosmology thousands of years in the past. Thus, we know about the flooding in Mesopotamia and the handing over of The Laws to Hammurabi by the Sumerian deity. Judeo-Christian-Islamic culture became most familiar with these stories through their Old Testament versions of Noah's Ark and Moses receiving the Ten Commandments.

Figure 1.3. Ye olde marketplace was as much a place to learn as it was a place to buy, sell, and barter.

Chronicles of Ulrich de Richental: Open Market, Courtesy of CORBIS, Inc.

The communications media of ancient times evolved slowly. First employing fragile clay tablets and sturdy stone walls to hold their writings and drawings, recordkeepers eventually began using animal hide parchment, which was the writing surface of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Egyptians used the stalks of papyrus reeds, pounded together, to form the earliest version of paper—a medium that was to serve the ancient Greeks well in spreading their heroic poems and revolutionary philosophical theories.

The scribes of Sumeria and ancient Egypt left behind records like the one shown in figure 1.4 revealing certain aspects of events, accounting, and commerce in their times. But evidently, they did little to distribute how-to knowledge among their contemporaries. (Most organizations began their use of computer networks following similar priorities.) It was a long time before efforts were made to deliberately save and make available recorded knowledge on media other than temple walls, sculptures, and clay tablets—media that were both lasting and portable.

Advanced knowledge—beyond what was required for day-to-day subsistence agriculture and home life—was concentrated in the halls of royalty, the counting rooms of merchants, and in the minds of priests and scribes who handed it down, through direct teaching and demonstration, to their apprentices. The rudimentary written languages of those early civilizations were limited in their ability to do more than recount events and record transactions. One could only tell limited stories through the use of different arrangements of wedge-shaped impressions and pictures of people, animals, and implements.

The Phoenicians developed the first standard alphabet around 1100 B.C. However, it wasn't until the Greeks invented symbols for vowels in the middle of the eighth century B.C. that humankind had a tool to express general knowledge in addition to the recording of specific knowledge about commerce and events. This was a tremendous breakthrough because it became possible to express meaning using a total of only 26 symbols.

As Charles Van Doren writes in A History of Knowledge,^[6] "Perhaps the human race is unable to think and know generally if individuals cannot write down their thoughts so that others can clearly understand them." This ability made it much easier for local knowledge to be made useful beyond the originating communities. Alphabetical writing and paper extended early knowledge networks beyond the closed and privileged confines of the royal court.

Figure 1.4. Pressing a stylus into soft clay in various configurations served the earliest bookkeepers for recording transactions.

Courtesy of Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis.

The Egyptian empire began around 3000 B.C., but because its Nile-based agricultural civilization was so stable and protected by the surrounding desert, its culture was conservative and reluctant to change and advance its knowledge. Its leaders enjoyed the safety of their kingdom's isolation, and it was not until Egypt began interacting with the more intellectually aggressive Greeks that one of its leaders was inspired to take an action that opened its ancient and imperturbable civilization to the influences of other advanced peoples.

At the beginning of the third century B.C., Egypt's king, Ptolemy I Soter, built the original Library of Alexandria. His purpose was to house a copy of every known book, which was to serve as a center for knowledge exchange and debate among scholars and scientists from all over the known world. Dialogue in the knowledge space of Alexandria led to many significant advances in philosophy and the sciences.

It was there that the scholar Eratosthenes devised the first accurate measurement of the circumference of Earth. Euclid completed his Elements there, detailing the study of geometry. Kallimachos of Kyrene, Alexandria's most famous librarian, created the first subject catalogue for 120,000 scrolls of the library's holdings, dividing all knowledge into eight major categories: oratory, history, laws, philosophy, medicine, lyric poetry, tragedy, and miscellany. His citations described something of each author's life, his works, and the number of lines in each work. Though it was by no means comprehensive, the library was the first attempt at a grand index to knowledge and a precursor to the Dewey decimal system and today's online databases of books and information.

The oldest recorded stories are honored as classics in our literature, and to this day, we look to many of them for guiding principles in our personal, religious, political, and cultural lives. Universal truths demonstrated through accounts of early human social interaction seem just as valid today, even after so many centuries of progress and change. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Greek mythology and drama, and biblical histories and the Psalms all describe human situations and express emotions to which we modern people can relate. These stories began as oral accounts and were eventually translated and transcribed into written form. But even after the standardization of writing, oral communication continued to play an important part in developing new directions for knowledge.

The philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle recognized the importance of creating and enabling social context—leading discourse in which new and controversial ideas would flourish. Socrates encouraged his students to question the conventional thinking of the times, an approach that led to his being forced to drink poisonous hemlock. Plato emphasized the value of nurturing spirited dialogue in pursuit of an elusive truth and created a place to support that dialogue: the School of Athens, pictured in Figure 1.5. Aristotle, a student of Plato, took his quest in a different direction, creating a school that he called the Lyceum where he focused on the empirical (observable) nature of knowledge, leading eventually to the development of the scientific method.

Plutarch, who lived centuries later, helped to revive these heroes of ancient Greek thought in his biographical writings, and he hosted conversations at his home near the Temple of Apollo. The roots of modern teaching institutions and universities were thus set in Western society. Only through questioning the known, these philosophical pioneers taught, could people arrive at the truth.

Figure 1.5. Plato's School of Athens, a philosophical think tank where the teacher surrounded himself with a "society of learner-companions.

Courtesy of Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis.

What we know of Western history tells us that a very few individuals—such as Plato and Aristotle in Classical Greek times and Petrarch and Boccaccio in the pre-Renaissance period—led the introduction of new knowledge and new ways of thinking to their respective cultures.

Francesco Petrarch almost single-handedly revived classical learning after the Dark Ages. Many consider Giovanni Boccaccio, a contemporary of Petrarch, to have been the first "Renaissance man," studying the arts, science, and philosophy and reconciling them in his writings. Together, these two stimulated interest in old Greek and Roman literature and science and thus awakened the long-dormant pursuit of new knowledge in Europe.

Western and Eastern cultures alike have always relied on both mythical and real-life heroes to lead them in new directions and to model new values and practices. After centuries of withdrawal into theocratic and feudal governance, Western culture needed these maverick champions, though neither gained universal recognition or acceptance during his own time, to snap it out of its inward-focused complacency.

Even as the bubonic plague wiped out much of the European population, the new ideas adapted from ancient ones by Petrarch and Boccaccio found an avid audience and a small but eager network of supporters. Thus, two curious, brilliant, and ambitious individuals sparked a revival of critical thinking that would soon blossom into the Renaissance.

In A History of Knowledge, Van Doren describes how one of the most horrific scourges ever to afflict humankind helped create the conditions that launched one of the greatest surges in understanding and intellect ever to elevate humanity. Three situations converged to turn the first use of a clever invention into one of the great events in human history.

In 1347, the bubonic plague was brought to Europe from the Crimea on a boat that docked in Sicily. It quickly spread into an epidemic that wiped out between a third and a half of the continent's population. So many died that, after the plague had run its course, the survivors inherited the property of the deceased and found themselves owning more assets than they'd owned before. Van Doren describes the last quarter of the plague-ravaged 14th century as "an epoch of burgeoning prosperity."

Among the goods left by the many who had died were clothing, bedding, and other items made of cloth. Rag paper, manufactured from all of this discarded cloth, had accumulated in surplus by the mid-1400s, at a time when interest in the classical knowledge revived by the likes of Petrarch and Boccaccio was reaching a state of genuine intellectual hunger.

These conditions—expendable wealth, surplus paper (the "bandwidth" of the age), and demand for knowledge—were thus in place when Gutenberg invented his printing press in 1450 (which mostly produced bibles; see Figure 1.6). Until that time, few people knew how to read, but fewer still could afford to own books, which were laboriously written, one-by-one, by scribes and monks. A handwritten book could cost as much as a small farm, so most knowledge resided in and flowed through the memories and hearsay of people, who passed it on the best they could to their children and fellow villagers by word of mouth.

After Gutenberg's contribution, the printing of books accelerated so rapidly that by 1500 there were more than 1,000 print shops in Europe, and all of the known handwritten books had already been put to print. As difficult as it might be for us to imagine today, book-wild Europe found itself suddenly with a lack of new content. In 1490, Van Doren reports, "publishers bemoaned the success of the new enterprise, which seemed to have rapidly exhausted its product at the same time that it had opened up an enormous, hungry new market."

Many more people—the "knowing classes"—learned to read and write, but for most "nonknowing" people, knowledge continued to be defined according to what could be orally exchanged within their class and trade. There was little crossover between the written literature of philosophy and science and the practical skills that produced most of the goods and services for the majority of the people. The new medium for knowledge transfer had not found its footing as a practical means of sharing best practices in the industries that served the vast majority of the population. Advanced knowledge was a very top-down thing, whereas common knowledge continued to be a grass-roots thing.

Figure 1.6. A page of the Bible printed on Gutenberg's press. This new medium changed the course of history.

Courtesy of Universitaetsbibliothek Goettingen.

Van Doren, citing numerous historical examples, observed that "any change, for a tyrant, is for the worse." This had been a truism of rule since the earliest of civilizations, and it was still so as Europe passed through the Dark Ages and headed toward the Enlightenment. The lack of a mass medium for spreading knowledge had been a major handicap to changing society and thereby to challenging tyrannical rule. Once the printing press became a commonplace technology, absolute monarchs had to deal with many more well-informed and well-educated subjects.

The spread of new ideas in Europe was also held back, even in the Renaissance, by the rising political authority of the Catholic Church, which regarded the emergence of scientific theory and experimentation as a threat to its intellectual hegemony. In the classic case of 1633, Galileo, under threat of death, recanted his scientifically derived observation that the earth revolved around the sun and that the heavens were not, as had been believed since Aristotle, immutable and unchanging. Old beliefs, especially when espoused at the time by the Church, were defended to the point of criminalizing any challenges posed by the bold purveyors of young Science. As still happens in many modern organizations, entrenched beliefs of Renaissance Italy rose up to squelch the introduction and adoption of new ideas and knowledge.

The big headline of the Age of Exploration was Columbus's discovery of the Americas in 1492. Every European monarchy then entered the competition to claim territory on other continents, conquer their native populations, and abscond with their riches. Overseas exploration was the R&D (research and development) of the monarchy, though once the way to the colonial land rush was known, the research activities were given less attention than the development projects. Laying claim to land and bringing home the loot were more important to the ruling classes than learning from newly discovered cultures because competition depended on accumulated wealth. And besides, all of the new and exotic cultures were assumed to be inherently inferior.

Still, as sailors and missionaries returned, knowledge of the world and its diversity flooded what had been Europe's closed societies. Following and, in many cases, accompanying the adventurers, populations of refugees migrated to the colonies to escape religious persecution and poverty, draining Europe of much of its own creative diversity. And as the wealth of the New World was hauled back to Spain, Portugal, France, England, and the Netherlands, it trickled down to the growing middle class, which—being more educated and informed than ever before—began to question the absolute powers of their kings and queens, opening the Age of Enlightenment.

New ideas and knowledge of politics, religion, economics, and philosophy were incorporated into the platforms of the French and American Revolutions. And once these two very different countries declared their freedom and independence from royal rule, it was only a matter of time before the rest of Europe would follow. But with the invention of the steam engine, a force even more powerful than political revolution was unleashed. Manual labor—a constant for thousands of years and the backbone of every human population throughout history—was about to undergo a revolution of its own.

In the preindustrial world, complex skills and trades were passed on from parent to child and from master to apprentice by direct demonstration and hands-on instruction. Schools and universities were attended by a relative few, even after books began to be printed. As nations came into being, guilds of skilled craftspeople drove the economies. Even the simplest farmer had to be a jack-of-all-trades in a very hands-on world. Beasts of burden helped with the heavy lifting, but few of them, beyond the horse and the hunting hound, could be described as "skilled." Human and animal power could only get so many units manufactured during a workday.

With the invention of the steam engine and the advent of the Industrial Age in the 19th century, people did more manufacturing with powered machinery. With the energy available from turning fire into steam, many more units could be manufactured by a given number of people. Steam and carbon-based power was obviously the best way to get things done in the physical world.

The comprehensive sets of skills and knowledge that had driven the preindustrial economy lost favor, in the eyes of business owners and managers, to the ability (and willingness) to perform more specialized tasks requiring much less subtlety, less training, less knowledge, and less creativity. "Repetition of simple tasks" became the prevalent job description.

Led by American industrialists, this change in labor needs became known as deskilling. Whereas a blacksmith required deep understanding of horses, metallurgy, and design, combined with hands-on expertise in the use of heat, iron, and tools, a line worker needed only perform the assembly procedures of a few premanufactured parts—a set of motions he or she would repeat all day long, day after day, for years (see Figure 1.7). Once those procedures were learned, there was little more knowledge to be acquired. Success lay in performing one's tasks as quickly and error-free as possible.

The goal of the company was to be superefficient, emulating the machinery that drove the manufacture of its products. Specialization also carried over into the bloated bureaucracies that supported the growing manufacturing companies. Governments expanded to provide services to the growing middle class and to regulate the increasingly large and powerful corporations.

Mass production meant getting the most possible work accomplished each day to serve growing mass markets. This became the driving goal of the organization, whether the end products were automobiles, shoes, or documents. To a great extent, today's organizations are still designed to seek efficiency above all. But with the rise of industrialization came further expansion of the middle class and the university system. Science extended into the social sphere, and people began to study the effects of the treatment of workers on productivity and on society as a whole. Social consciousness had, at long last, taken root in the workplace.

Figure 1.7. Pass the auto frame, please! A factory worker tries to keep up with growing demand.

Courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

While mechanized manufacturing altered the face of work life, advances in transportation and communication set us on a path toward even faster change in the way we interacted with the world and with each other. Railroads and steam-powered ships shrunk the planet, and the invention of the telegraph and telephone made it possible for people to move information back and forth at relatively instantaneous speed. The ability to move goods and conduct business correspondence so much faster than before spurred the growth of industry and forced a reevaluation of the focus of management.

In the early 20th century, F. W. Taylor formalized the trends that began in the preceding decades into an approach he called "management science."^[7] Based on "clearly defined laws and principles," it aimed to increase the productivity of modern industry by studying the tasks, the tools, and the incentives and then tuning them for best performance.

Knowledge of performance was gained by such practices as putting a stopwatch on workers and measuring the difference in output between those paid at different rates. Recommending optimum shovel sizes for moving various materials was a typical example of Taylor's theory put into practice. Ford Motor Company embraced his approach in making its assembly lines more efficient, though one result was that many workers could only stand the pace of such efficient production for a couple of years. This didn't seem to matter, though, as there were always many others willing to take their places on the line.

Management science was praised and criticized by conservatives and liberals alike because while it objectified work and made it easier for workers to produce more in a given timeframe, it continued to treat workers as if they were cogs in a machine, showing little consideration for their health, happiness, opinions, or recommendations. Business was still very far from supporting conditions that would foster conversational networking among workers. What collaboration did occur in the first half of the 1900s was among academics, who found the work environment a fascinating object of study and experimentation.

Taylor's pioneering work inspired others to elaborate on the science of management, putting more emphasis on planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, reporting, budgeting, directing, and leading in the workplace. The concept of the bureaucracy flourished during the early 20th century to the point where tending to the organization became even more important than achieving its purpose. The Italian government became so enamored of the scientific management process that it had 20 bureaus studying how to cut out much of its unnecessary bureaucracy.

As the structure of the organization got all the attention, little mind was paid to the value of the individual worker. Informal conversation—spoken or written as intraworkplace correspondence—was regarded as idle talk: a waste of time that would distract the worker from performing the all-important assigned tasks and reduce output. With the rise of labor unions, talk between workers on the job was suppressed even more, being recognized as a threat to the company and a means for workers to organize and challenge the power structure. No one was ready to accept the possibility that conversation would lead to smarter, happier, more cooperative workers. And no one was asking whether the worker might have valuable contributions to offer to the usable knowledge of the company.

Executives and managers were hired specifically for the education and experience they brought in the door with them. The know-how they came with was considered sufficient to run the organization for years. There was very little, if any, emphasis on continuing education or new knowledge generation within the work force. So naturally, there was little incentive to learn, to teach, to support conversation, or to bring up new ideas. But that was "just the way things were" at the time, and few complained.

Attitudes about management began to change when, in 1939, the Hawthorne Studies led by Elton Mayo^[8] showed that social factors in the work environment influenced individuals and their performance. The studies also demonstrated that change within the workplace was likely to stimulate more change. The resulting new approach to workers and workplace led to improvements in working conditions.

After World War II, studies revealed that no single management approach was appropriate to all business situations and that the social and technological elements within a company were interdependent. These "discoveries" might seem self-evident to us today, but notice that they took quite a while to be accepted and ingrained into what was taught in business schools. Relevant to this book is the conclusion that the structure of an organization is closely tied to the information systems it uses.

In the 1960s, Edgar Schein^[9] proposed that management theories that looked at people from the economic, social, and self-actualizing perspectives were still too simplistic. People are complex, he wrote, as are the organizations in which they work. Schein recognized that no single management style can succeed in improving the performance of all workers and that the motives of an individual worker are liable to change over time. He also pointed out that high satisfaction alone does not necessarily lead to higher productivity.

This increasing focus on the individual and the motivating factors that lead to higher productivity was a distinct departure from the viewpoint of scientific management. The worker could no longer be treated as a mere cog in the machine if maximum productivity was desired. Consideration had to be given to what would drive the worker to perform best over the long haul. In the 1980s, the idea of collective decision making entered the picture as part of the new school of Business Process Reengineering. More worker empowerment would lead to a greater sense of responsibility, smoother workflow, and less load on the management layer.

Reengineering got its name from the very process that it recommended: reorganizing the way that the organization functioned from top to bottom. In principle, it appeared straightforward. Companies had to change their management philosophies and restructure themselves to reflect that change. In practice, the change process itself began to suck up the time and resources of the company to the extent that the benefits of the change were often lost. As was true about managing the growth of bureaucracies, the purpose of the organization was sidetracked into the reengineering process. The individual worker ended up even more confused than before, and productivity suffered.

The role of the individual within the organization was certainly evolving, but knowledge networking activity remained limited in terms of who participated, the consistency of its practice, the means of communication, and the availability of information. Technology has since had an impact on all of those limitations.

From here on, the history becomes more familiar to most of us. The advent of the Information Age began rather ponderously with room-sized mainframe computers like the one shown in Figure 1.8, accelerating decades later with the introduction of desktop personal computers and computer-mediated networks. These systems quickly evolved in sophistication and speed, penetrated the office and the workplace; and people—thousands and then millions—began to use them from their homes.

The earliest adopters of networking technologies were, naturally, the populations that designed the systems and had the systems designed for them. These included engineers, programmers, scientists, the military, and academics. As we track in more detail in Chapter 2, "Using the Net to Share What People Know," they invented the first communications applications such as email and conferencing, and they set the stage for what was to happen once networking advanced beyond its initially limited accessibility. To a great extent, they modeled the first online knowledge networks. The design of computers, software, and the Internet were all collaborative efforts that piggybacked on existing stages of technology to plot the improvements for the succeeding stages.

Figure 1.8. Not a desktop model, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was designed to help aim the big guns of World War II.

Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania.

In the 1990s, as the Internet became accessible and user-friendly to regular citizens outside the workplace, the inadequacy of the management science approach and its derivative theories became very clear. Information could be produced, transferred, and distributed to thousands. It could be stored and retrieved not only by the specialized "data drones" and the upper echelons of the organization's hierarchy but also by everyone who had access to the tools and the networks. The hierarchy was still essential for commanding the work force and for dealing with peers in other similarly structured organizations. However, it proved to be slower in moving valuable knowledge around than allowing employees to directly network with one another and with the exploding volume of information available on the Net.

As the Web opened to the world, information began zipping around from so many sources to so many destinations in such volume and at such speed that management was forced to admit its limitations in keeping up with it. Information, which various pundits insisted "wanted to be" both free and expensive, had escaped and was acquiring other qualities, mixing truth and fact with rumor, error, and deliberate lies. Companies founded specifically to work through the Web led the way in fitting its capabilities to their business needs, while large established corporations sweated out the possibility that they'd missed the boat and might be displaced by progressive new competitors.

Outside the organization, the old knowledge-sharing traditions of conversation, direct demonstration, and storytelling were being reborn through the Net. The toolmakers and the tool users found a common communications ground for enabling widespread distribution and discovery of fresh information and ideas. Organizations were no longer leading the technological revolution. Those organizations not formed around the Net were finding that their ability to find and exchange information was simply too slow to keep up.

Some businesses, especially new ones that could move without the leg irons of legacy beliefs and practices holding them back, joined the technical subculture to find the information they sought and to communicate with the people who possessed it. Encyclopedias and libraries "went live" on the Web, forced to evolve quickly in an environment that seemed perfectly suited to their core purposes of storing, cataloguing, and retrieving information. Organizations—handicapped by procedures and practices that had worked when employees had few opportunities to communicate their ideas to each other—recognized the widening gap between their internal operations and this new network of free-flowing information. They found themselves trapped in closed systems while, outside, their customers were conversing, criticizing their products, lambasting their services, trading ideas for improvements, and inventing new companies and methods to outdo them.

The business world's first reaction to these rapid changes was to better organize its operational information using the networking technologies of its closed internal systems. To move faster—to counter the speed of the Internet—businesses attempted to improve the flow of information within the company by identifying their most vital facts and figures, making sure they captured and stored them, improving systems to retrieve them, and instructing their managers and employees to contribute whatever they knew to a database of total company know-how and experience. The totality of this practice became known by a term that many now consider an oxymoron: knowledge management.