« The 3-D's of Change | Main | KM and "the Need To Know" Basis »

December 23, 2006

Street Cred versus the Uncommon Knowledge

In the world of expertise, knowledge is power; but power isn't enough. Knowledge and expertise go hand-in-hand, but if not for marketing, the value of knowledge could be largely undetermined.

Before we go on with this, prime your pump with this holiday sampler of pieces from Jack Vinson at Knowledge Jolt With Jack. Jack writes about knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints and more. He's offered a quick tour that you can take at your leisure, in handy categories. Definitely do the first one, if your'e squeezed for time:

Expertise:
http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2006/11/22/clay_shirky_on_expertise_again.html

Expertise locators:
http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2006/06/23/expertise_locators_on_the_brain.html

The KM keystroke:
http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2006/09/06/f1_as_the_knowledge_management_key.html

Definitions:
http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2006/08/29/km_definitions_from_my_perspective.html

Jumping into the fray, here's my pitch:
Knowledge is content, but by itself it isn't product. In the markets, "expertise" is the packaging used for knowledge transfer. Its point is to convert contents into applications. Applications! Now there's a product.

This is why it actually makes sense to hire experts; that's how you, as the consumer, access the knowledge. And yet there still might be an issue of customer satisfaction; what if the expertise doesn't bring the knowledge you really wanted? It's not that it couldn't -- just that it didn't. Is that aggravating, or what!

This ultimately highlights the issue of value: when we're shopping for expertise, we're shopping for knowledge delivery, not necessarily for the knowledge itself. In the end, the credibility of an expert is usually about his track record of delivery. It's nice if that credential is based on delivering under real-world pressure, not just under pressure of exams. But let's not get distracted: we know the knowledge is out there in many places, and we want the credential to tell us the best place to get it.

This helps explain the difference between credibility and authority. To the point, we can think of authority in terms of "authorship" -- nothing less than the virtue of having defined the knowledge in the first place and thereby being its master. Authority is at a different location than credibility in the knowledge supply chain. It's not the distributor or the retailer, it's the manufacturer or producer.

Consequently, the more we are determined to get right to the knowledge and skip the packaging, the more we're predisposed to cut out the middle man: experts.

Of course, cutting out the middle man leaves us with a situation:
- we either have to do more work (shopping), or
- we have to accept that what we buy may not be the best of breed.

In the first case, we probably want to be lucky; and in the second, we probably want to be... smart!

My favorite practical stance on that is all about being able to accept what happens.
- In the former case, it's the first rule of shopping -- After you've bought it, stop shopping.
- In the latter case, it's the second rule of shopping -- You're not perfect, but you're perfect for me.

This practicality isn't very sexy. Being your own expert is just not the same as being someone else's. But the good news is, not being someone else's expert isn't going to hamper you in getting your hands on authentic knowledge.

The bad news is that you might be competing with other people's experts, to get your hands on it first, before they obfuscate it with packaging.

In the Web Do Dot Oh-ver era, the biggest problem is getting faked out by electro-powered shoppers and distributors posing as authorities. Be forewarned, they might be merely experts.

Well, gotta run; my unauthorized autobiography is overdue at the editor's.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at December 23, 2006 5:18 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.malcolmryder.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/302

Comments

Post a comment