Business Exposed156
team. In such instances, talking to a few internal experts improved
their chances of putting together a winning proposal. However,
the internal document databases were always useless at best. The
more these rookies tried to tap into the mountain of electronic
documents available to them, they worse their chances of coming
up with the winning bid.
The advice I derive from this research? Shut down your expensive
document databases; they tend to do more harm than good.
They are a nuisance, impossible to navigate, and you can’t really
store anything meaningful in them anyway, since real knowledge
is impossible to put on to a piece of paper. Yet, maintain your
systems that help people identify and contact experts in your
rm, because that can sometimes be helpful. But make sure to
only give your rookies the password.
Exaggerating to make my point
OK, I will admit to slightly exaggerating to make my point
. . . Of course it would be silly to suggest, for example, that all
electronic storage of documents is futile. However, I am quite
serious about this bit: true in-depth knowledge about a complex
system such as an organization and its competitive advantage is
usually impossible to put on to a piece of paper. It often has a
large tacit component that can’t be articulated, let alone trans-
ferred via some printed document; you really need face-to-face
communication.
Professors Szulanski from INSEAD and Winter from the Wharton
School wrote about this issue: “When it comes to complex
systems, we found that no single expert fully grasps, and no set
of documents fully captures, the subtle ways in which individual
components are interwoven with one another.”
For example, I have seen quite a few companies set up some
form of acquisition database; business units or departments that
had gone through an acquisition would put their models and
documents on to an internal company database that other units
can access, to prevent them from having to reinvent the wheel.
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