Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow

CHAPTER 5

Driving for Success

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

—Herb Simon, 1971, American psychologist¹

INTERNAL MARKETING: THE MYTH OF BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME

Any organization that wants to create awareness of its products will turn to marketing strategies to get attention from its customers. Sometimes the same organization will even talk about internal customers for certain types of endeavors. But when it comes to internal marketing, the position often seems to be: “Well, we just order things to happen!” Those having to drive internal initiatives forward often wonder why they have to go through bells and whistles to convince their own staff, get their attention, and carefully nudge them into certain behaviors.

In the past, you might have been able to order that some processes be followed, but with the complexity of today’s organizations, the many choices that knowledge workers have to focus and spend their energy on getting people to really change by just ordering them to is not as common. So you will have to apply similar strategies for your internal markets than you do for your external ones. The key message is: Do not be shy about internal marketing.

This is especially true with a knowledge flow management initiative. You are trying to engage people and want them to share something—their knowledge—that they might consider their most valuable asset. How can you use marketing techniques to make that happen?

There are a number of lessons we learned ...