Understanding the power of a quality relationship management depends a good deal on an awareness of people’s behaviour and preferences. Soliciting from any group, community or department, what motivates, inspires and provides satisfying experiences is key to creating strong bonds and powerful alliances that drive buy in and support, no matter the context.

Currently relationship management, across all it’s various attributions, is poorly understood and even more abysmally executed. If the current understanding of relationship management is simply to monitor and respond to negative commentary on your reputation, your brand, your business or your services, or to follow up and cross sell when the customer or client has fallen off your radar, this is no better than shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted it. It’s about listening, responding, reciprocating, acknowledging, modeling ethics and values, everywhere you are or your business is active.

The value of building and maintaining a reputation built on the seven principles of human givens (accountability, boundaries, respect, responsibility, honesty, support and trust) means creating cooperative alliances and rewarding relationships. This cannot be short cut, avoided, undeserved or manipulated. We are each being held to account on our behaviours in regard to our commitments and on this we stand or fall in peer assessment.

There is no excuse now, given the quantity and quality of tracking technologies and social media assets, not to create a formidable and very manageable strategy to build and sustain quality relationships and use all positive testimonials, word of mouth recommendations and quality referrals to build personal and professional capital as well as business advantage. To fail to implement such a strategy is to be asleep at the wheel in a fast moving and competitive world.

You have only to count the number of contributors who helped author Digital Nomads to understand the nature of ‘new media, new work’ paradigm.  Scroll to the end of the article and do a count…yes, that’s collective intelligence and knowledge capital at work. No doubt the geographies and timelines that intersected in the aggregation and evolution of the final whitepaper was greatly facilitated by continuous access to the web and a broad variety of social media tools.

‘Having a mobile workforce means exploring what productivity means to you as the employer and having clear communication of goal and progress. The benefits of having digital nomads outweighs the costs.’  It can lead to reduced infrastructure costs, better connections with customers, and happier employees. All of which are cost savings to the employer.’

Times, they are a changing.

Capturing critical knowledge ought to be the concern of every organisation. Implementing strategies that can consistently solicit current data and learned efficiencies from members of staff should be a key investment. Most organisations seem to be blind to the value and cost savings that such an obvious opportunity to safeguard working practices represents. In a world where downsizing and churn have escalated substantially, every valuable employee is a walking silo of powerful information.

Retention of ‘knowledge capital’ for incoming hires or those who are subsuming the tasks created by reduced personnel is a formidable benefit that facilitates accelerated performance potential. Knowledge capital affords the company that judiciously invests in its mining and dissemination the capacity to sustain momentum during times of transition.

Paul Strassmann, the Chairman and CEO of the Software Testing Assurance Corporationm whose career includes service as chief information systems executive for General Foods, Kraft, Xerox and the U.S. Department of Defense seems to agree with me as articulated his article ‘Knowledge Capital:

‘Indiscriminate discarding of knowledge as an enterprise asset, whether in the form of accumulated employee training or junking of legacy software, has its origins in ideas proposed over a century ago about the value of capital and labor. These theories claim that only capital assets increase the productivity of labor.

Consequently, the productivity of an enterprise is measured only in terms of the productivity of its capital, such as return-on-assets or return-on-investment. The providers of capital are then entitled to the surplus, called profit or rent.

If knowledge happens to be necessary for labor to make better uses of capital, that becomes the justification for a higher wage rate for labor. By this reasoning, those performing the actual labor are not entitled to collect rent from the knowledge they have accumulated. Labor can receive only fair compensation for the time worked. The most they are allowed to claim is to be awarded premium wages and a bonus here or there.

The above reasoning is not only misleading, but also results in judging the value of employees on the basis of their wages, rather than how fast they accumulate useful knowledge. The productivity of labor is not only a matter of wages. Productivity comes from knowledge capital aggregated in the employee’s head in the form of useful training and company-relevant experience.

The individual’s point of view

Let me illustrate this by an example. You hire an untrained person who meets entry-level requirements, such as literacy, a work ethic, and socially acceptable behavior traits. His or her wage will be based on prevailing wage rates for entry-level skills.

Ten years later, that person becomes a manager or expert, earning three times the entry-level wages. How does a firm justify spending three times more on the identical person?

The accumulation of company-specific knowledge explains the difference. During those 10 years, the organization invested anywhere from a year’s to several years’ worth of salary in helping the employee to function more effectively. Hardly any of that expense shows up as a direct cost.

Most of it is in the form of attending meetings, having phone conversations, keeping up with company gossip, and making errors that, if corrected, can be charged to learning. None of that contributes to anything the customer is willing to pay for. Industrial engineers call such expense “overhead.” I call it money spent on an accumulation of company-specific knowledge capital. If organizations spend their money well, employees with 10 years of accumulated knowledge will be worth more than what the company pays them.

One can view Knowledge Capital as the result of a stream of expenses that have helped an organization to become more effective over a period of many years. Meetings are not necessarily wasted, because they may contribute to greater employee awareness. Training is useful if it is put to good use by making it possible to reach higher levels of quality and productivity.

The time has come for those responsible for “information management” to rise to the challenge of placing the management of Knowledge Capital high on the agenda of every organization.’

Social media tools such as wikis, blogs and podcasts can provide inestimable records of ‘corporate conversations’ between management and staff, vertically and horizontally, that gives a dynamic depiction of what is relevant and what is changing.  A powerful reflection of how your company is really operating and who is providing true value can be elicited from such capture points when translated to performance related outcomes.

What Is the Learning Code?

“Without the Learning Code to limit, filter and organize incoming information, your brain falls into a buzzing hubbub of chaos.”
– JW Wilson, Advanced Learning Institute

Organisations have started harnessing collaborative intelligence for learning leading to cognitive involvement of the community members, according to Vandana Ahuja of Customerthink, an independent research and publishing firm focused on customer-centric business strategy. Research has already proven the positive correlation between interactivity and learning outcomes. Interactivity interfaced with technology not only increases learning effectiveness, but also enhances the knowledge base of the community which includes organizational employees, customers and partners.

Learning Organizations Win!

Indeed, organizations that do not learn fast enough die, with more than 330 of the companies listed in the Fortune 500 in the 1960s no longer existing today, as evidence to the fact.

In the 21st century, corporations and government organizations must acknowledge that the speed at which their workforces can learn dictates their success. Unfortunately, most of us who have worked in these institutions recognize that there are severe limitations to the standard lock-them-in-a-box (classroom), talk-to-them, make-them-study-and-test-them method of learning. It is estimated that 85 to 90 percent of what the average attendee is taught at a traditional training course is forgotten within 12 weeks!

By understanding how to turn on the Learning Code, organizations can dramatically accelerate the speed of learning and the depth of behavioral change in their workforces.

Conventional training methods are often deemed a waste money, although their intention is to foster organisational growth. Now, according to A. J. Wilson, the creator of Cracking The Learning Code,  there is a science-based solution.

Cracking the Learning Code is designed for anyone frustrated by their organization’s speed of learning, retention and behavioral change.  An individual’s learning speed and capacity is deemed a highly positive asset, therefore, in an information-rich world we can no longer rely on unscientific learning systems designed 2,400 years ago in an agrarian age when information doubled every 1,000 years. We should be receptive to the cutting-edge scientific principles outlined in the Learning Code.