This fourth issue of The Learning Economy newsletter is the first to include a link to a feature interview, and Robert Hillard kindly accepted my request to participate.
I’d have liked to have included the content of the entire interview here, but I found that this system can’t accommodate its full length to distribute via email. Go figure – I don’t understand it, either.
Robert is chief strategy and innovation officer of top accounting, finance and management consultancy Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, in Melbourne, Australia. I greatly enjoyed this conversation, and I’ve also included the link beneath in the first of the stories.
In this age, information doesn’t just provide a window on the business, increasingly it is the business, and as the author of Information-Driven Business (Wiley, 2012), Robert gets this, more than most. We spoke in early August for a free-ranging conversation, with a limited agenda.
In his role, Robert positions his firm to tackle the disruption of technology, new competitors, challenging economic conditions and changing regulatory priorities.
He was previously managing partner of Deloitte Consulting, more than doubling the size of the business during his tenure, and was, at the same time, a member of the Global Deloitte Consulting Executive.
I previously interviewed Robert in relation to the nature of the evolving workspace in my role as a director of Shiro Architects, researching “what lies beyond activity based working?” The text of that conversation is here.
As he explains, by background, he is not only a technologist but an information management specialist, and he has strong and instructively formed views about how knowledge is best formed and managed by leaders and teams across an organisation, using the most powerful tools ever invented for the task.
I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.
The usual preamble
As a general and possibly recurring note, I intend that, interviews aside, this newsletter will most likely comprise from six to 10 links as I find items I consider interesting enough to pass on, and its themes will be much as you see beneath. If you know others likely to be interested, please pass this on to them.
And, if you are able to suggest additional links, content or sources you find interesting and believe will fit both your own and other readers’ purposes, please let me know at graham@thelearningeconomy.com.
In anticipation, thank you, I always love to be better informed, and thanks for reading. And in this instance, please forgive my indulgence in linking to one of my own posts first, but I do so in the belief that it points to one argument for organising knowledge in a familiar and structured way that most businesses can adopt as a usable platform.
That aside, I hope you enjoy the content I have linked to beneath.
Robert Hillard is not only a technologist but an eminently qualified information management specialist, and he has strong and instructively formed views about how knowledge is best formed and managed by leaders and teams across an organisation, using the most powerful tools ever invented for the task.
The right idea can make a business work and, over time, our successes become ingrained in our mental models. The opposite is also true. If we begin with the wrong mental model, important problems become impossible to solve.
Elon Musk famously posted Tesla’s long term strategy in 2006 and ended the post with “don’t tell anyone.” That has led many entrepreneurs around the world to follow suit and be transparent about what they are up to and why.
“We bring implicit theories, or rules, to how we behave at work,” said Amy C. Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School. “Everyone at work has two jobs, and the other is the job of looking good… These rules are largely oriented toward the second job.”
Many business people have already discovered the power of storytelling in a practical sense – they have observed how compelling a well-constructed narrative can be. But recent scientific work is putting a much finer point on just how stories change our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.
Three key reasons why actively managing knowledge is important to a company’s success are: 1) It facilitates decision-making capabilities, 2) It builds learning organizations by making learning routine, and, 3) It stimulates cultural change and innovation.
Most successful business model innovators only experiment with one business model innovation idea. Experimentation happens on the level of how to make this one idea work, rather than on the level of which business model alternative works best.
Today most startups are trying to re-segment existing markets or create new markets. How do you diagram that? What if the basis of competition in market creation is really the intersection of multiple existing markets? Or, what if the markets may not exist and you are creating one?
Credits
Thanks to these writers: Greg Satell; Fred Wilson; John Herrman; Paul J. Zak; Lisa Quast; Marc Sniukas; Gary Klein, Tim Koller, Dan Lovallo; Steve Blank.
Believing there is far more intelligence in the world than ever gets heard or used, I am also convinced there is much new value to be created and learned from by making sense of and bringing focus to previously disparate, disaggregated and underused knowledge.
The internet lends itself neatly to such ideas. It is the only vehicle we have ever had that does this. And it is also favourably disposed to the discovery of where knowledge isn’t being applied to learning where one might have hoped it would be.
To those reading here, I’d like to invite your personal participation in, first, an Australian, but ultimately, an international study on the subject above. Please follow the link above for more.
Who am I?
I am an independent writer for hire, and by professional background, a former sub-editor on the pages of the Australian Financial Review newspaper group at Fairfax Media in Sydney.
I also have an MBA (Technology) from the University of New South Wales in Sydney. The forward-looking focus of that qualification is on creating and managing the organisations of the future, both driving and in response to changes in technology.
Through it, my professional experience, my skills and other related study, I discovered a fascination for documenting and transforming knowledge to drive social organisational and community learning, for its many applications, using the best technologies ever invented for the purpose.
I have a professional aim to build my business on the back of transforming workplace knowledge into reports managers and leaders can act on, using Wikipedia, broadly, as a model for an early deployment, as I have described in this post on The Learning Economy.
I aim also to work on helping ASX-listed companies transform their knowledge into annual reporting that will attract investors and bolster their share prices.
That aside, as a freelancer, I’ve written much corporate and marketing documentation over a number of years, and one thing I enjoy and feel comfort in doing is turning speech into blog posts, features and documents for business purposes.
I also have an appetite for assisting busy executives by helping them, by recorded interview, turn and tidy their knowledge, experience and thoughts into opinion pieces, posts and corporate statements.
If my skills can prove of help, contact me to find out more at graham@thelearningeconomy.com.
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