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Myths in management
are rewarded when others use their stuff, in the form of increased
respect in the company, heightened status, and sometimes even
in terms of hard cash after their annual performance evaluations.
How can you as a provider make yourself seen and heard in the
information quagmire?
Professors Morten Hansen and Martine Haas – at the time at the
Harvard Business School – examined this issue. They examined
the electronic databases of one of the Big 4 accountancy rms
and surveyed its 43 “practice groups” on their strategy of what
documents to upload and when. And they came back with some
pretty clear insights into what works and what doesn’t.
You have to understand that these different practice groups face
some simple but concrete choices: how selective are we going to
be in terms of the documents we upload; are we going to upload
pretty much everything we get our hands on, or are we only
going to put up a mere fraction of what we have? What is the
maximum number of les we would like to put on to the system?
Do we cover a fairly wide range of sub-topics or are we going to
be much more concentrated in terms of the subjects we cover?
The trade-offs are pretty clear; if you upload very few documents,
people can only access very few documents. But if you put up
many of them, potential users may be turned off, can’t see the
forest for the trees and turn their attention somewhere else in
disgust (while swearing at you for the sheer overload and making
rude hand gestures to their computer screen). But where does the
balance lie?
Hansen and Haas found out that where the balance lies depends
on what topic you are publishing on. If the practice group was
providing information on a topic that was being covered by
quite a few other groups (such as, “cost management”, “capital
and asset management”, “nancing and IPOs”), they were much
better off being very selective in what they put on their site.
Those who made few documents available quickly gained a
reputation as the group which always delivered high-quality stuff
without swamping you with irrelevant, low-quality distractions.
More people, as a result, accessed their pages.