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The Knowledge Coach – Make sure the knowledge gained by top employees doesn’t leave with their retirement

Make sure the knowledge gained by top employees doesn’t leave with their retirement, say Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap in their new book, Deep Smarts. One solution: Develop a knowledge transfer coach.

by Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap

Editor’s Note: "Deep smarts," as Harvard Business School professor emerita Dorothy Leonard and collaborator Walter Swap see the term, is the intuition, judgement, and knowledge, both explicit and tacit, that is stored in the heads and hands of your employees. It’s the experienced shop foreman who intuits a developing bottleneck in the assembly line and creates a fix before a problem occurs. It’s also the CEO who draws on years of experience to solve a strategy imbroglio that has paralyzed top staff. It’s the venture capitalist—who has sat through hundreds of CEO interviews over the years—developing a gut reaction that a particular candidate, while spectacular on paper, isn’t a good fit for his portfolio company. At the end of the day, as Leonard and Swap argue in their new book, Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom, this accumulated expertise is what makes your organization viable.

Full Article: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=4562&t=organizations&nl=y

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