Knowledge Socialism: The Personal Risk and the Organizational Bonanza of Enterprise 2.0

In this article I will describe a problem that may be the biggest barrier to the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 applications among companies. I will try to offer a solution.

The two things every rich businessman knows

My boss, a very experienced and savvy businessman, once asked me a question:

“Do you know what are the two most important things every rich businessman knows?”

After confessing that I didn’t know, he said, “The first thing is, if you know of a way to make money, keep it to yourself!”

“And what is the second thing?” I asked eagerly.

At that he just smiled!

It took me a couple of minutes to understand that he had just pulled one over my head. By not answering the second question (and by his being much wealthier than I) he had demonstrated the importance of keeping one’s knowledge to oneself.

How to keep your knowledge to yourself and become rich and famous

Imagine that you are a salesperson and that you have just found a secret benefit of your company’s product. It is such a huge benefit that customers can’t open their wallet fast enough when they hear about it. It has tripled your sales in the last month. But the best thing about this benefit is this: None of your fellow salespeople know about it.

What would you do?

Schedule a meeting and tell everyone about it, or
Keep it to yourself

Telling everyone about it might make you the company hero for a month; you might even get a bonus.

Keeping it to yourself will

Make you the leading sales person
Triple your salary
Make you a prime candidate for the position of sales manager

The average corporate employee will undoubtedly keep this “tip” a secret. This is the peak of knowledge capitalism. However . . .

Knowledge socialism (Enterprise 2.0): the most profitable thing your company can do

The flip side is that the best thing for your company is that you tell all the salespeople about the hidden benefit. It is ironic, but when it comes to knowledge, the best way to make a company profitable is to act like a socialist. It’s better for the company if everyone share their knowledge freely (within the company).

It is in the best interest of your company that you blog about the product benefit and/or open a Wiki page to explore the benefit and think of ways to incorporate it into the company’s marketing and sales effort. The sales of your company could triple!

And herein lays the rub. Sharing knowledge (Knowledge Socialism/Enterprise 2.0) is overwhelmingly important for the company and is very much against the employee’s personal financial interest.

How to align an employee’s gain with knowledge socialism

To successfully integrate knowledge socialism/Enterprise 2.0 into the enterprise, management must find a way to make it in the employee’s best (financial) interest to share his knowledge with the company. This might be very difficult. A “tip”, after all, can triple the employee’s salary and make him next in line for his boss’s position. A “tip” is worth a lot, but the company can’t afford (in more ways than one) to pay out huge bonuses to people with ideas. But . . .

Companies can create a reward structure for thinkers—a structure that benefits thinkers by paying them more, improving their position in the company and increasing their reputation both inside and outside the company.

The person or company that will fully understand how to do this will become immensely successful. Let’s hope they don’t keep this knowledge to themselves.

This is the first installment from a series of articles about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 in organizations.

Discover Enterprise 2.0 Ideas and News

The Enterprise Irregulars are a group of smart people that discuss Office 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 ideas and news.

I read some of their blogs, but reading all of them was too much (they blog about other things beside enterprise 2.0 and the reading-load was beyond my capabilities).

Being the smart group that they are, they understood the problem and created a central blog to aggregate their Enterprise 2.0 related posts.

I subscribed to the feed and if you want to discover cool Web 2.0 ideas and breaking Enterprise 2.0 news, I suggest you do the same.

How typing may lead to madness (and how to avoid it)

Warning: shameless self-promotion ahead

The Psychology of Typing

Sometimes, there is no way around it. You just have to sit down and spend an hour—or two, or three—typing. It’s boring and often infuriating. Boredom, as Wikipedia tells us, leads to anxiety. And mixing anger with anxiety can lead to—madness!

And so, at Cogniview, we have decided to create a new product line that will help lessen anger and anxiety in the world. Products that dramatically reduce the amount of typing in your life. The new Typing Free™ product line.

A typing-free world

PDF2XL is our primary and best-selling product. Several thousands of clients are already using it and IMO it’s the best PDF to Excel conversion tool in the universe (I’ll admit I am a bit biased).

So if you want to avoid typing data from PDF documents to Excel, give PDF2XL a try.

PDF2XL OCR is a new product. It combines OCR technology from IRIS Software with PDF2XL’s data extraction interface.

I am proudest of two features in PDF2XL OCR:

The data-validation module: Every OCR engine has recognition errors, but one thing that most OCR tools lack is a way to efficiently browse through the suspected words and correct recognition errors. Our data validation module displays the suspected word and the image of the actual word from the document side by side (with a huge zoom). This helps you catch a problem in a fraction of a second, because your eyes see the difference and you don’t actually have to read.
The numerical column: An OCR engine works about a million times better if you tell it that it is trying to identify a number (I’ll expand on that if anyone is interested). When you define a column as numeric in PDF2XL OCR, it asks you whether you want to try to improve results by rerunning the OCR only on that column!

If you need to convert data from scanned documents to Excel, give PDF2XL OCR a try.

PDF2XL Enterprise is really a magical tool. It combines a print driver with an extraction tool. You can print whatever you want to it and then extract the data to Excel. It also includes all the functionality of PDF2XL and PDF2XL OCR.

Check it out. It’s really cool!

The secret, sure-fire way to avoid madness, hand cramps and blindness

Buy one of our products. They are good for your health!

A web 2.0 Song

Guy Ruvio is a dear friend of mine, which I have been trying to persuade to blog since I learned about blogging. Imagine my horror when I found out he started blogging in Hebrew. How will the English speaking world read his brilliant stuff? And then it dawned on me. I can steal his work in the guise of “translation” and get all the credit.

So without further Ado…

A web 2.0 song

Web 2

Do you get the feeling that we will make do?

Is it really over?

Have you noticed all the sites talking about web 3.0?

——–

The Web

In numbers

It feels good to count

It’s a primal need

But everybody keeps ignoring the number 1

Do you see companies saying – we are the solution to web 1.0?

communication 1.0?

It’s just to remind

I left the one behind

——–

I want a domain

Or a blog

Or a search engine,

To call my own

To hold in the night

——–

Alone?

Together?

A sense of community?

Cooped up at home?

In any case, the psychologists will have more work

——–

Web 2.0

Is it a technology?

A Trend?

A Buzz?

A Spin?

Revolution?

Revolution!

——–

I opened a blog

A diary of my own

I am no longer anonymous

Who will read it?

What does it matter?

As long as we push adsense into it

——–

Google

Will pass a billion

Won’t make it

Changed the world

Talented people

I want too

——–

Google

did it

So why don’t we buy

Booble

Doodle

Xooxle

It’s the domain that counts

They’ve all been lent?

Did you stop to think about content?

——–

Mashups

A picture on a picture

A site on a site

A service on a service

Playing with Lego

Does anyone build with bricks anymore?

——–

Software as a service?

Sounds good to me

I get this need to kick it

When the blue screen comes on

Getting a service from the blue?

I’m bought.

——–

Google Docs

Save it all at Google’s

Or on my Computer?

But they know everything about me

Not using Google!

Oh, What the hell,

Google it is,

Now I can work from anywhere

Damn what are these commercials?

How do they know I love Taami**

Enough

Going to the Beach

What does it say there on the billboard?

——–

Programming

I Program

I Model

I Design

I Photoshup

Like Mashup

10 Photoshuppers needed for a successful startup

——–

VCs

Web 2.0

Come on…

At least try to disguise the herd affect

I’ll tell you a secret

Where the herd is, the good grass is already gone

And there is only dead weed

I actually saw a couple of good companies

Where?

At TechCrunch

Or one of its

Mashups

——–

In 98 we built

Hosting providers

In 99 we built

ASP

In 2001 we blow up

In 2005 we woke up

And built

Software as a service

Software on demand

Multi Tenant applications

Hold it!

What?

IS everything the same?

What is changed?

Kids, help me find the difference

——–

Web 2.0

I am there too

I don’t understand what it is

But there’s something there

If everybody’s going there, there must be something (there)

It has to be

If Vardi could at 99

Why can’t I do it now?

——–

Web 2.0

Experts

Isn’t it a contradiction?

——–

A collaboration plant

I am building a collaboration plant

Anyone can water it

And leave a comment

Or a talkback

Their messanger number

Maybe a girl will stop by as well

That would be great

——–

{Censored}

——–

{Censored}

——–

Talkback

I will leave a comment

I have stuff to say

And the world will hear

Let the people know

I am First!

Damn, who left the comment before me?

——–

Web 2.0

In war time

The one book I don’t want to write!

——–

Big Companies

Small Companies

Medium

And Microscopic

Even for me

There is a place

In the Web 2.0

——–

What will be the next big thing?

Electronic Ink

Implanted Cellular phones

A Bionic Shoe

Or plug-ins?

To the brain

Well come on guys, that’s very easy

Web 3.0

Electronic Ink

Implanted Cellular phones

A Bionic Shoe

Or plug-ins?

To the brain

I Guarantee It.

**Taami is a popular low quality chocolate bar in Israel

A South Park Me

To counter the previous post which was somewhat serious and for those of you who were wondering how I look like. Here is how I would look like if I were a South Park character…

You can also create your south park self here.

Read Professor’s McAfee’s Blog - It will probably make you smarter and happier

It is not a simple thing to do - Reading Professor Andrew Mcfee’s Blog.

Being a Harvard professor, he writes long posts, uses Harvardian English and writes about theoretical issues. But if you are interested in web 2.0 technologies and/or their adoption in the enterprise - this is the blog for you.

I also found that when I read articles that were written by very smart people, I experience a surge in gray matter activity.

And to top it all, every once in a while he writes a piece that makes me feel better about the world we live and work in. Here is the last paragraph from his recent blog post:

“Web 2.0 is empowering all kinds of creators: hacks to be sure, but also craftsmen and artists. Shouldn’t we be truly excited to experience the best of the worlds they’ll put up on the World Wide Web?”

To sum up … Read Prof’ McAfee’s Blog. It’s good for you.

Knowledge Socialism: The Personal Risk and the Organizational Bonanza of Enterprise 2.0

The two things every rich businessman knows

How to keep your knowledge to yourself and become rich and famous

Knowledge socialism (Enterprise 2.0): the most profitable thing your company can do

How to align an employee’s gain with knowledge socialism

Related reading

Discover Enterprise 2.0 Ideas and News

How typing may lead to madness (and how to avoid it)

The Psychology of Typing

A typing-free world

The secret, sure-fire way to avoid madness, hand cramps and blindness

A web 2.0 Song

A web 2.0 song

A South Park Me

Read Professor’s McAfee’s Blog - It will probably make you smarter and happier

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