collect our payBelieve we're gliding down the highwayWhen in fact we're slip sliding away."Slip Sliding AwayPaul SimonAccording to the accounting software giant Intuit, the average American today works 14 hours more per week than he or she did in 1969. Would it be naive to suppose that we can reverse this trend, or are we doomed to continue working harder, and getting nowhere fast in the process? Like the fellow in the rowboat, rowing harder won't do the trick, particularly if the boat's pointed in the wrong direction. Some Barriers to Learning1. Knowledge TransferIn tribal New Guinea - largest of the 17,000 islands in our Malay archipelago - around 800 distinct languages are spoken. Very little imagination is required to visualize how life might be affected by this. Some New Guinea tribes, dwelling in small isolated communities and speaking a language only they understand, live pretty much the way they did 25,000 years ago, their belief systems untouched by other civilizations. The sea or the forest supplies their primitive needs. Beyond the immediate environment, their home turf, lies danger, darkness, and strange people speaking foreign tongues. Knowledge transfer is not an issue in tribal New Guinea.But for the modern corporation, knowledge transfer is ever-present as an issue, even though it may not always be recognized for what it is. As Thomas Davenport points out in Working Knowledge, without a shared language, the members of an organization can neither understand nor trust one another. He is speaking loosely of a "language", as in a taxonomy or shared understanding, and not just of speaking French or Tagalog, but also of speaking the language of mechanical engineering or even the language of social class. British Petroleum, for instance, hires consultants to translate reports made by "roughnecks" who work on BP's North Sea oil rigs, into a language that its executives back in London can grasp. 1To get beyond this language barr...
