COULD PURPLE COWS REVIVE KM?

Fast Company

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:

1. Find the customer group that’s most profitable, or most likely to influence other customers. Figure out how to develop for, advertise to, or reward either group. 
2. Launch a product that does nothing but appeal to, and let you dominate, one underserved market niche.
3. Create two teams: the inventors and the milkers. Put them in separate buildings. Hold a formal ceremony when you move a product from one group to the other. Celebrate them both, and rotate people around.
4. Get the email addresses of the 20% of your customer base that loves what you do, and make something extraordinary for them.
5. Remarkable isn’t always about changing your #1 product. It can be the way you answer the phone, launch a new brand, or price a product.
6. Test the limits. Ask what it would take to be the cheapest, the fastest, the easiest, the most efficient, the most x.
7. Think of the smallest conceivable market and describe a product that overwhelms it with its remarkability. Go from there.
8. Find things that are “just not done” in your industry, and then go ahead and do them. 
9. Ask, “Why not?” Almost everything you don’t do has no good reason for it. 
10. Ask what would happen if you simply told the absolute truth inside your company and to your customers?

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.