Continuity Management: Preserving Corporate Knowledge and Productivity When Employees Leave

Chapter 1. Knowledge Loss in the Information Age

Each generation of business leaders has had to deal with a characteristic threat to profitability and, sometimes, survival that came to define their era. War, inflation, depression, stock market collapse, foreign imports, and labor shortages were all serious threats to business enterprises in the past century that had to be countered if those organizations were to survive. The first decade of the new century offers no exception to the litany of threats; it merely adds a new one: knowledge loss. The loss of knowledge from departing employees poses a threat to the productivity and prosperity of contemporary organizations that is equal to the great business threats of the past century. Those organizations that can surmount this challenge by preserving their organizational knowledge base while job transfers, retirements, terminations, and resignations deplete the knowledge base of their competitors will be the business success stories of the century.

Knowledge Workers

Peter Drucker, perhaps the foremost management thinker of our time, coined the term "knowledge worker" in his 1959 book, Landmarks of Tomorrow. In 1994, he predicted that a third or more of the American workforce would be knowledge workers by the end of the century (Drucker, 1994, p. 53), a prediction that he confirmed in 2001 (Drucker, 2001, p. 2). Knowledge workers are the members of the labor force whose skills are primarily intellectual rather than manual. They create ...