 Fast Company‘s Seth Godin is writing about purple cows . What’s a purple cow? Something that is remarkable, worth talking about, worth paying attention to, something that stands out compared to “perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows”. Here’s an example that Schindler Elevator came up with:When you approach their new elevators, you key in your floor on a centralized control panel. In return, the panel tells you which elevator is going to take you to your floor. With this simple presort, Schindler Elevator Corporation has managed to turn every elevator into an express. Your elevator takes you immediately to the 12th floor and races back to the lobby. This means that buildings can be taller, they need fewer elevators for a given density of people, the wait is shorter, and the building can use precious space for people rather than for elevators. A huge win, implemented at a remarkably low cost. Matt Mower of Curiouser and Curiouser thinks Knowledge Management (KM) needs a purple cow, a product, concept or innovation as remarkable in its way as Schindler’s presorting elevator. He suggests KM is moribund, and says “the whole field of KM is dominated by the idea of being good enough“. Matt is talking specifically about KM products, but what he says is true of the whole, newly-boring field of KM. Five years ago, six of the top ten best-selling business books were about KM, and the field was hot: today none of them are. KM gurus are blaming the economy, the unfortunate name “knowledge management”, and each other for the sad state of the discipline. But the simple truth is, nothing remarkable and implementable has emerged in KM in years. If a purple KM cow could revive the discipline before it goes the way of TQM and BPR, where could we find one? Seth suggests ten ways to raise a purple cow:
Think about the different aspects of KM in your organization: intranets, extranets, communities of practice, external database purchases, research, push/pull distribution. Think about the internal and external customer segments for each aspect, and how the ten ways above might apply to create a product, a process, or a tool for one or more segments that is really remarkable. I’ve pulled together a few possible purple KM cows from discussion with a couple of front-line KM practitioners. I’ll share them here next Friday. |
May 8, 2003
COULD PURPLE COWS REVIVE KM?
EXURBAN TALE #3: SOMEWHERE SOMEONE CALLS MY NAME
 It’s been raining, and our arthritic rescue dog Chelsea is feeling the weather. Usually the after-dinner walk is a brisk, one-mile constitutional, but this evening Chelsea makes clear she wants to meander down by the pond, so off we go, equipped with flashlight and leash. The latter is solely to restrain possible “Devil made me do it” charges into the already duckweed-covered South pond – she is a water dog, after all.
The spring peepers are in full chorus tonight, and as we edge through the forest the noise is deafening. These frogs are less than an inch long, and so well camouflaged you can barely see them in full daylight, but their voices can be heard up to a mile away. Each peep is an enormous effort, as the male frogs swell their lungs with air and expel it with the power and urgency of life and death. Each male’s ability to attract a mate depends on making his voice heard among the din, and female peepers prefer the males with loud and long songs. The mating song lasts only through May and June up in these Northern latitudes, and the rest of the year is a solitary struggle of male and female adults to eat enough to make it through to winter. Then their fat-enlarged body surfaces and circulatory systems are suffused in just one day with self-made glucose and alcohol that will freeze their bodies as solid as rock but prevent hypothermia and serve as anti-freeze for their blood, as they hibernate under logs until the warming Spring sun signals it’s time to sing again. The sex is long and spectacular, a traditional male-on-top coupling and external fertilization of thousands of eggs, that can last days. Then the exhausted adults rest and abandon the tadpoles to the most extreme version of Shirky’s Law : In captivity peepers can live a dozen years or more, but in the deadly, crowded pond only a tiny proportion of tadpoles will live long enough for their first coupling, and those that reach adulthood will live on average only two or three years. The life expectancy curve moves only grudgingly when the pond swells enough to create more room for living, so the frog density stays unchanged. So the song we’re hearing is raucous, desperate and exuberant. This is hard rockin’, party hardy, devil-may-care, live-for-today music. The words of Neil Young’s Will to Love (actually a song about salmon running upstream) come to mind: Sometimes I ramble on and on and repeat myself till all my friends are gone The peepers’ song has been going on for two hundred million years, sixty times longer than humans have been around to hear it. But frogs are very sensitive to changes in their environment, and have all but disappeared from many urban areas. The planned massive spraying of standing water this summer, to fight West Nile carrying mosquitos, could well end the ancient song forever. |
