Continuity Management: Preserving Corporate Knowledge and Productivity When Employees Leave

Chapter 3. Knowledge Continuity: The New Management Function

Management isn't what it used to be.

But what is it?

For the first time in 100 years—since Henri Fayol described the five functions of a manager and the fourteen principles of management—a new function has emerged to alter the basic configuration of a manager's responsibilities. This time, the change is not the work of one person, but of broad social and economic forces that have made knowledge a capital asset and dramatically shifted the way in which businesses operate. With knowledge as the new fulcrum on which organizational fortunes turn, preserving knowledge continuity has emerged as a basic management priority and, hence, a fundamental responsibility of management.

The effort to preserve knowledge and maintain knowledge continuity between employee generations may well stretch back to the beginning of recorded history, when official records were first kept of actions taken by rulers, governments, religious institutions, and armies. On December 31, 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal charter to the East India Company, the earliest example of a joint stock company, and so created the first need for knowledge continuity in a public company (a company, by the way, which is still in business after 500 years).

In the Industrial Age, attempts to preserve knowledge continuity included official records, formal policies and procedures, management directives, letters to employees, newsletters, wall posters, slogans, and so forth. ...