Knowledge Sharing as a continous process

Most of the time people see Knowledge Sharing as an overhead activity, completely out of scope, or try to pack it inside of a project or workshop to be done in some days or hours.
Knowledge Sharing should be much more than that, it should be a running maintain activity. If somebody needs something that you know, for the company is better if you expend some minutes explaining that then this person have to look for it, expend a lot of time searching and learning pieces of it in many different places.

Thinking about time expent, some minutes from people who knows are cheaper than many hours from people who doesn’t know and needs to buy this knowledge from nothing.

Thinking about medium term benefits, if you help someone with some expertize you have, this person will do the job better and faster, the results for the company will be better and it will come back to you and everybody soon. If everybody does that, the Synergy makes the benefit much bigger.

Here in Shell it should be considered “Enterprise First” behavior but some managers seems not to see the benefits of it and for the whole company, only worried about their specific “to do’s”, ignoring that everybody are multicultural and multi-knowledge people and maybe me or you know what somebody is looking for.

If you see somebody or something when you can use your knowledge to help, do it. It will be better to everybody! Share your knowledge, build this sharing culture, one day you will need and somebody will be there to give you the directions.

Regards,
Alex

Book "Sinergia" (Synergy) from Sergio Lins

Last week I received an e-mail from Sergio Lins, that was my professor in MBKM, offering his book named Sinergia (Synergy in portuguese). I had a look at some pages in his website and the book seems to be great. I'm very excited to start reading it.

The book talks about how to create, develop and keep the synergy, capitalizing the knowledge built in this process, not only in an Enterprise world but also personal and interpersonal.

Also some lessons learnt from consultants and executives that are investing a lot in Collaboration and Knowledge Management methodologies to improove the synergy in their business.

For the ones who speak portuguese, it is a very good book to read. I'm already waiting for mine to arrive.

Alexandre lopes

Kiva.org - loans that change lives

Some weeks ago I found a very interesting site called Kiva.org that is a social network to provide microcredit.

The idea is very simple. There are many microcredit institutions around the globe and all of them need money to give as much credit as possible. Also, there are many people around the world who would like to help people in other countries with at least a small quantity of money. Then Kiva, created by Matt and Jessica Flannery in 2005, came to provide this link between people who wants to help loan small quantities of money to those people in developing countries who needs money to improove their small business and pay it back later.

The only concern I would have to Kiva is that we loan money to them, they send to those organizations locally and they loan our money with very low interests, but still interests. When the person pays back they keep the interests and just pay back to us our money. It's like we are a bank with 0% interests. Anyway it is still a good initiative.

Kiva is already in 39 countries, helping more than 28700 projects with an average of 600 dollars each.

If you want to help someone in the other side of the world with some dollars you have stopped in your account, just go there and create an account. This is one example of connactions that trigger actions.

Alex Lopes

Interactive Innovation and Knowledge Management group

Last week I received an e-mail asking me if I could be the focal point in Shell Brasil inside of a group that will discuss and share what is being done around innovation and knowledge management inside the big companies in Brasil. Petrobras (NOC), Vale (3rd biggest minning company), Embraer (flight constructor), 3M (innovation company), BNDES (National Bank for Development – getting specialized in intangible assets), and some brasilian government institutions: FINEP, INMETRO, ONS, ANP and TJ.

After ask my manager permission, she approved and now I’m going there to represents Shell what will be good for Shell Brasil (having a person there to share what we are doing and learning from them) and to myself (expanding my KM connections inside of the big companies in Brasil.

Next 7th May there will be the first monthly meeting of this group of companies and I let you know here what happened there. Now is time to collect as much information here in Shell Brasil as possible around Innovation and KM being used. If I don’t find much I will talk about Shell global.

Regards,
Alex Lopes