Knowledge Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations (Part 1)

By Sharil Dewa

If knowledge management was a remarkable issue for discussion in think tanks for some time ago, now knowledge leadership is a notable story and has attracted thinkers who work on management and information services fields.

Of course, these issues are not separated from each other and in many aspects overlap each other. Knowledge leadership indicates significant challenges which have been dealt with by managers in recent years. Today it is completely probable that no other factor may have great impact and initiate fundamental changes more than value creation. The convincing evidence for this claim is the increasing interest of organizations in finding new ways to achieve more values and benefits for their organizations.

Communication media developments have made valuable knowledge accessible not only to a handful number of senior managers within an organization, but also to many executives in numerous companies. In the past time, highly ranked managers of organizations concentrated their attention on long term scope and main decisions, while today impressive knowledge is being produced and distributed more and more by a knowledge system which is comprised of knowledge workers in every company. So, a new generation of knowledge-based organizations is emerging which may be called value creator organizations.

What are value creator organizations?

A value creator organization provides unparallel knowledge leadership for its clients to deal with unpredicted challenges. We mean maintaining a competitive situation among competitor organizations for producing and achieving commercial knowledge by “unparallel knowledge leadership”. This is the cause of superiority for an organization in producing goods or making services especially in critical and challenging times.

Enhancing clients’ comprehension of enterprise and economical conditions in post-industry era needs human-dependant knowledge work and integrated service operations require all of the efforts of a value creator organization. This leads to clients' loyalty with the organization in long time. Constant flaw of challenges makes the organization's authorities busy with study and research to find new ways for dealing with clients' changing needs. In this way, value creator organizations empower their knowledge potential unintentionally and this makes their reliability more than before in their client’s eye-view.

Improving performance, productivity and increasing production capacity and workers’ satisfaction all are other objectives pursued by a value creator organization. Therefore value creator organizations more than everyone can be attractive for industrial and productive companies, because these organizations pay attention exactly to those priorities which are important for industrial bodies. The considerable point is that value creator organizations can offer the required frameworks for industrial companies in the form of software packages. So, formal knowledge changes into practical knowledge for these companies. This is that the question usually asked by knowledge economists as: “Can knowledge be sold as a good?” has a positive response through a practical methodology.

The real meaning of value creator organizations reveals when these kinds of organizations take the responsibility of instruction in industrial companies and teach active human resources in these companies based on flexible marketing strategies. Value creator organizations usually pursue three main objectives in the aspect of instruction:

A) Offering new commercial perspectives to learners so that their business intelligence may increase;

B) Deepening organizational thought and business management; and

C) Encouraging collogues and teammates to share their knowledge with each other.

Who is a knowledge manager?

Doubtlessly knowledge managers are new form of organization managers. These managers are not included exactly within traditional organization charts. These managers often are found in internal nodes of organizations and just on common borders between units and subunits of organizations. Command and control positions are not usually without these kinds of managers.

Offering a definition for knowledge manager requires an acceptance and a realistic comprehension of this title. It also requires that an intellectual remind the responsibilities of a knowledge manager based on the development of functions and knowledge management solutions when he or she hears this term. The question which arises here is that “Do we really need knowledge leadership?” or “What kind of knowledge leadership do we need?”

Through knowing knowledge leaders types, we may be able to present an accurate definition for each kind of managers based on their roles and according to our organization need.
In a multi-aspect study conducted by Delphi Group, it was revealed that knowledge leader may cover a vast domain of organization posts and embrace similar functions and attributes. The most remarkable attribute is a mixed experience of business and information technology, something that needs an experience of at least ten years in each field. Organizational thinking and interest in a level of enterprise that development is one of its inevitable consequences, is another necessary requirement. These leaders should consider current relations in organization hierarchical levels and meanwhile strengthen informal networks for building and maintaining informal and hidden organizations. Through these channels knowledge leaders may be able to introduce new methods and systems for the encouragement of researchers to compete with knowledge providers.

Why do organizations need knowledge leaders? The need is completely obvious because they should overcome natural barriers over knowledge sharing in big enterprise environments. This is in fact the essence of knowledge management. Organizations in every size and expertise believe that experience sharing and not only the application of technology is in the heart of knowledge management abilities for realizing commercial objectives and meeting clients and users' needs. This is usually done in open cultures through empowering communication channels. Knowledge leadership is needed to accelerate the establishment of required environment for knowledge sharing.

To prove this claim, it should be noted that knowledge leaders who were emerged more distinguishing than others showed special characteristics such as: knowledge gathering skills, organizing, classification and organizational relationship building. Meanwhile, they were equipped with other advanced skills such as information technology for succeeding in their business. Although it is impossible for organizations today to make their knowledge influential without using information and communication technologies, it is always expected for managers to be capable of essential management skills and bring web-based communications along with face to face negotiations.