In other words, radical change is the result of all sorts of practical steps — not a single burst of charismatic leadership or big-picture vision, but new habits learned and reinforced with simplicity and regularity. That doesn't mean change has to happen slowly. Quite the opposite. For big change to happen fast, people have to embrace new ways of working or collaborating or eating — but the new behaviors have to be defined clearly.

Source: "How I Downsized Myself" by Bill Taylor (Harvard Business Review)

If you're looking to move your organization's culture from control-and-command and need-to-know to open, collaborative and knowledge sharing, don't look for a silver bullet or miracle technology. The secret lies in planning and executing the practical steps that lead inexorably from where you are to where you want to be.

Open-Source Knowledge Management:  This has my vote as the most potentially disruptive technology for law firms.  What lawyers do, at its core, is manage knowledge and implement systems for applying that knowledge to solve clients' problems.  I'm not talking about case law, statutes, and other knowledge accessible via legal research here--that is so voluminous that, while they may keep some tidbits in their heads, most lawyers have long ago realized that they had to rely on external archives of information.  Instead, what I'm talking about is the knowledge of how to apply the law, lists of best practices for doing so, and systems for applying those best practices.  Few, if any lawyers have conceded that they might need a system for this knowledge.  Instead, it is something that you're supposed to learn and remember.  But our memories are spotty, and even the most experienced lawyer doesn't have access to the depth and breadth of best practices available to the "crowd."  For that reason, the potential of open-source knowledge management and development of legal systems (checklists, indexes of best practices, etc.) has the potential to truly disrupt the way most lawyers and law firms do business today.  Additionally, while many firms tout the benefit of their institutional knowledge to clients, no firm can compete in breadth and depth with a cooperative, open-source knowledge management tool that connects solo and small firms across the country.  Because it has the potential to fundamentally change how attorneys practice, and because it has the potential to eliminate the single greatest selling feature of mid- to large-size firms, open source knowledge management is a disruptive technology to watch.

Watching the movie I was struck by the fact that we often under value the human ability to participate in something bigger than ourselves for no other reason sometimes than it’s the right thing to do and there in lies the first secret. 

True change is never about rational decisions impossed upon an organization.  True change results from people joining in the change because it’s the right thing, at the right time and the right place.  You don’t need 100% of the people — you just need enough to tip the scales and you get that through creating a shared vision that appeals to both the mind and the heart.  And therein lies the second secret  — you have to believe in the change passionately yourself or you can’t lead anyone where you yourself are unwilling to go. 

Doing the right thing -- a surprisingly rare impulse.

My advice to new entrants to this space looking to create a collaborative backbone: The technology is a sideshow compared to the cultural issues, the individual incentives, the management style, and the budgeting and resource allocation paradigm. I think CSC's rapid success is due mostly to its methodically designed, relentlessly pursued culture of innovation. I suspect that not every implementation of Jive or any other product has such a happy ending.

It's REALLY not all about the tools. However, a well-chosen, well-designed tool can make your life a great deal easier.

At a time when organizations are looking to pull themselves up from a near death spiral by surgically focusing on set of needed business fixes, instead of providing the necessary depth to articulate what’s structurally wrong with a given mode of conducting a business activity and how enterprise 2.0 could be a possible performance enabler, the focus often is on the benefits of social towards more nebulous outcomes such as openness, information and email overload, sharing, and productivity. All of these are important but addressing these benefits need to be a means to some measurable business end.

Instead of Kumbaya and community, focus on the top-line benefits you expect to achieve. That's the tough standard to be met by every knowledge management initiative, including each Enterprise 2.0 initiative.

Even though so many businesses rely on SharePoint for their enterprise knowledge management needs, they continue to struggle to find, organize, and distribute knowledge to the right people at right time. What's wrong this picture???

Since I found this claim in a blog that appears to be advertising, I have to ask: does your experience accord with this? Why doesn't SharePoint provide the answers to the KM questions we've been asking?

Know when to give up. The best entrepreneurs know when to press the restart button. Manage risk by failing fast, regrouping, and moving on.

To be honest, I thought failure was the result of poor risk management. It's interesting to think of failure as a risk management strategy.

Even though I've been saying for years that social networking will one day usurp email, it's a bit shocking to see that it has. 

There are some caveats. My kids use Facebook as their primary inbox (they also use gmail). So some of what they do on Facebook is actually email.

But even so, it looks like email's reign as the king of communication is ending and social networking is now supreme.

Are the reports of the demise of email premature? I suspect that there still are lots of organizations that are drowning in email, even as they try to gain traction for their Enterprise 2.0 efforts. This will take time.

Firms are going to have to think more carefully and systematically about what resources they have, as well as their skill set and expertise within the firm. They will also have to think more about knowledge management and will need to determine how the firm knows what it knows and how it can leverage that knowledge in ways that are more distinctive. I think it’s a shock to many law firms when they hear GCs say that they regard most firms as roughly comparable, but that’s a common sort of attitude, so they’ve got to work on differentiation.

How can knowledge management be used to help a law firm differentiate itself in the eyes of a client? How does KM help improve the quality and efficiency of client service? What's KM's track record in your law firm?

Software that uses brain scans to determine what items people are thinking about was among the technological innovations showcased Wednesday by Intel Corp., which drew back the curtain on a number of projects that are still under development.

The software analyzes functional MRI scans to determine what parts of a person's brain is being activated as he or she thinks. In tests, it guessed with 90 percent accuracy which of two words a person was thinking about, said Intel Labs researcher Dean Pomerleau.

The secret wish of many users is to have an application that can find information online before the user has even begun to formulate a precise query. In other words, who wants to learn and use search syntax if the computer can do the thinking for you?

Be careful what you wish for...