ier, a language-neutral platform is needed. A virtual community where issues of language don't exist, and individuals can interact easily. 2. Space, Time and MemoryHow big is too big for a organization to know what it knows? More than one study suggests that the maximum size -- one in which people know one another well enough to have a good grasp of collective knowledge -- is between 200 to 300 hundred individuals. Remember the space and time issues surrounding the thousands of islands within our virtual Malay archipelago of information. We intuitively understand the depth of knowledge and resources in far-flung corporate empires such as Siemens AG or General Electric, but consider the barriers to getting at the right information in such a diversified enterprise. Think about people working in plants and offices and laboratories scattered across the globe speaking 14 languages. Who knows who in such an enterprise? To be sure, there are electronic gadgets for everyone -- PDA's and powerful computers and databases and cell phones ad infinitum. A cynic might say, "So?"How does an organization remember? If it is an extraordinary organization and has good access to projects that were kept on paper and digitally, how has it managed the recall of these events?When Bridgestone/Firestone decided to recall some 6.5 million tires in August of 2000, some employees could remember the last such event. "Twenty years is a long time, but memories of how a huge government-mandated recall in the late 1970's nearly bankrupted Firestone Tire and Rubber -- the company's name before the Bridgestone Corporation of Japan bought it in 1988 -- clearly resonate.""'The oral history around here is that we were a lot too slow to cooperate back then,' said Christine Karbowiak, a Firestone spokeswoman." 2Though "luck" wouldn't seem to apply in a case such as this involving millions of potentially defective tires, having employees around who remembered the missteps of th...
