by Janus Boye
What do I have to do to earn and deserve the key relationships that are going to get me where I want to go?
As one of the world’s leading authorities on the management of professional service firms, David Maister is among the top business thinkers in the world. His book on Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What’s Obvious But Not Easy is a must-read for strategic thinkers.
Relationships play a key role when it comes to knowledge sharing, as trust is one of the vital factors that makes knowledge sharing work. To paraphrase the classic book title, investing time in both relationships and knowledge sharing is obviously the right thing to do, yet not easy.
Too busy for knowledge sharing?
One of the inevitable results of a period of an economic downturn is a greater focus on business efficiency. Fortunately, the kinds of things that we all work with are one of the key ways to provide such efficiency. Web-based business processes have matured from being nice-to-have icing on the cake to being absolutely need-to-have core infrastructure, and a dead-centre requisite for future success. And in such a business context, the winners are those who can implement such systems best, with the fewest surprises and a minimum of deadline slippage and cost over-runs.
This means that digital leaders are increasingly busy and short-term priorities tend to make it difficult to do what is best for the longer term. That goes for knowledge sharing and relationship building as well, which both requires an investment in time.
Also, most people are rewarded for what they know, not what they share. This again means that knowledge sharing tends to lose in a busy working day with many different important projects.
As David Maister emphasises in his thinking, a winning strategy is actually doing more of what everybody knows they should be doing.
You make knowledge sharing happen
We’ve intentionally designed the Boye Conferences and Boye Groups with knowledge sharing and relationships at the very centre. We depend on participants and speakers alike to share their hard-earned experiences both as a part of the formal programme during the day and also at the organised social events. We prefer speakers who really want to pass on know-how and insights to their peers and give the audience that they need, rather than rock stars who’re in it for the glory!
Our entire business model is actually based on helping our colleagues in the world of digital decision-making to get beyond glossy presentations and sales pitches to the nitty-gritty of what happens in the real world. We want to move beyond traditional one-to-many communication of traditional events.
Boye & Co provides you with an audience of your peers, the kind of people who will appreciate in full what you’re on about, and what it really entails. A venue where I hope you can feel you’re among friends and can be open and curious.
I hope you’ll use the opportunity to listen and to learn, but even more importantly to talk to each other, renew old ties and make new acquaintances and contacts. That is knowledge sharing in practice.