In Part I, you came to understand the acute and chronic threats of knowledge loss to organizational productivity. You examined the unique importance of knowledge and its emergence as a capital asset in the new economy. You discovered that operational knowledge is a commodity that can be passed from one employee generation to another and also a process by which existing knowledge is acquired and new knowledge is created. Perhaps you've even become intrigued by the competitive advantages of continuity management. All of which leads you to.... what?

To a knowledge hole. To the question of how to go forward, to implement, to make continuity management happen. After all the whys and whats, it's time for the how-to's.

Continuity management is made powerful by its application. Like any business model, framework, or paradigm, it is useful only if it can be implemented to achieve specific organizational objectives.

Whereas Part I is primarily about concepts, Parts II and III are about action. They describe how continuity management can be implemented in any organization by managers who recognize its potential and take advantage of it. Subsequent chapters thus focus on implementation—on the journey to continuity management—and on the road map for getting there. Part II depicts that road map through a literary device. Rather than the essays of preceding chapters, the next seven chapters employ entries from a journal—Brett's journal—as a narrative lens through which to understand continuity management and the means for putting it into practice.

As a singular account of how continuity management came to be implemented, Brett's journal chronicles the problems and opportunities, disappointments and successes, and conflicts and collaborations that are part of every change effort that results in organizational transformation. It explains the principles, guidelines, and procedures for implementing continuity management and the decisions and steps that convert its concepts into action. Although the journal is fictitious, its contents are the culmination of hundreds of interviews and conversations and thousands of hours of research involving real people facing real knowledge continuity problems in real organizations.

The stories in Brett's journal happened; only the names of the people and their organizations have been changed (the names of the people fictionalized and the names of the companies changed to the name of Brett's company). In cases where the names of these companies can be revealed, a footnote does so. Since some of the stories are knowledge continuity disasters, however, many of the executives who shared their experiences preferred not to have their companies identified. In these instances, a footnote is used to describe the company (e.g. one of America's largest banks), but not to identify it. In other examples, the names of the organizations have not been changed at all.

Brett's journal depicts a world of knowledge discontinuity that mirrors the everyday experiences of thousands of managers and executives who contend with the loss of valuable employees and the knowledge asset they take with them. You may recognize some of these situations—and even some of these people—because they are not uncommon in the turbulent world of job turnover and knowledge loss that characterizes the Information Age.

Before opening Brett's journal, there are a few things you might want to know about its author. Were you to meet Brett at a cocktail party, you would learn that he works for WedgeMark, a company you may know. It often appears in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Were you to talk with him about your job or his, you would discover that he is slightly irreverent, often thoughtful, occasionally harried, and, in his own way, sincere and determined. Much later, you would find that Brett believes in what his company can be—even if he doesn't quite believe in what it is—and that he wants to make it more productive and a better place to work. He would wince if someone said he was searching for more meaning in his job, but the truth is that he is.

Brett is neither cynical nor naive, although he tends toward the former. He has put up with a lot that doesn't work over the past 15 years on the trail of jobs that has brought him to his midlevel manager's position at WedgeMark. During that time, he has seen many ideas come and go, and he doesn't want to have to put up with any more bad ideas that some idiot has dreamed up, pawned off, and left for dead on the steps of his cubicle. Yet Brett still searches for more productive answers, more innovative approaches, and more creative products that will allow him to serve his customers in a more personal and effective way and help him feel even better about himself and his work.

So the idea of continuity management resonated with him, and he remained intrigued but too busy to give it much thought after first reading about the concept. Then, at the end of a particularly difficult day, one of his best people announced that she was leaving unexpectedly. As he reflected on the coming loss, his thoughts turned to knowledge discontinuities, the price WedgeMark paid for them, and continuity management. In truth, Brett told himself, WedgeMark suffered crippling knowledge losses from high job turnover. Furthermore, the retirement of long-term employees from key positions posed an even greater threat. Finally, he admitted, WedgeMark wasn't even getting its new employees up to speed fast enough.

So Brett found the concept of continuity management appealing and resolved that he would look into it. If he became convinced of its potential, he told himself, he would try to bring it to WedgeMark. And, in the process, he would keep a journal to discipline his thinking. Like the journals of Lewis and Clark he had read as a youth, but on a much more modest scale, he intended it as a record of events and a personal account of an exploration into unknown territory. He would include key ideas, pertinent documents, memorable conversations, and anything else related to the implementation of continuity management at WedgeMark—should such implementation actually take place, of course. Only time would reveal whether his journal was to be abandoned on the road to continuity management—or tell the story of the biggest idea he had ever taken on.