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How and Why Your Business Strategy Eats Your Business Culture for Breakfast

strategy

How and Why Your Business Strategy Eats Your Business Culture for Breakfast

Global leaders across the globe have found that corporate strategy is critical to business success. Corporate strategy could be the most important component of success in the ever-changing business environment of today.

Executives evaluate the success of corporate strategy. Corporate strategy reflects the degree to which a company can expand and determine the right pathway to success. The key function of a corporate strategy is to help executives utilize it for goal achievement. In this context, corporate strategy is becoming the forefront of success in corporations worldwide. Success, therefore, is dependent upon how executives formulated their organization’s strategy. Corporate strategy has been a focal point of the executive span of control but has not been associated with leadership enough to make it an integral part of organizational success.

One outcome of corporate strategy is to connect knowledge with other companies that want to share successes and failures. Leaders can inspire organizational members to network with more successful competitors by sharing successes to build alliances and not only enhance competition but communicate best practices as a way of keeping the highest standard of operation in the industry. In doing this, leaders implement a corporate strategy to develop relationships with external environments to identify new opportunities that occur in an ever-changing hypercompetitive marketplace. Leaders, in fact, implement a corporate strategy to expand the growth opportunities available to organizations that may be challenging, but, important to close the gap between success and failure. This leads to converting acquired knowledge into organizational processes and activities to improve or discontinue processes that contribute to success.

Furthermore, executives focus on individuals as the major source of knowledge and show how follower’s ties together so that they can affect the sharing, storage, transfer, and apply knowledge within organizations. Executives, therefore, see these connections, and the related shared knowledge and memory, as central to the effectiveness of corporate culture. Executives know that corporate strategy through sharing individual knowledge around the organizations can positively contribute to building a strong corporate culture. Therefore, executives should build an atmosphere of trust and openness and use corporate strategy to convert individual knowledge into valuable resources for their organization to close the performance gap and help organizations prosper.

The key is for executives to inculcate corporate culture within organizations so that information can be found and used instantaneously. Corporate culture enables organizations to promote the depth and range of knowledge access and sharing within companies.

Corporate culture is enhanced by providing further opportunities and information sharing. Executives can enhance knowledge sharing by providing access to knowledge, and stimulate new ideas and knowledge generation, transfer an individual’s knowledge to other members and departments, and improve knowledge capturing, storing, and accumulating, aiming at achieving organizational goals.

Executives that employ corporate strategy can propel knowledge sharing in the company to generate more innovative ideas and solutions for new and demanding issues that come up constantly in our hypercompetitive economic environment. In doing this, executives can employ corporate strategy through implementing coaching and mentoring practices by sharing experiences gained by imitating, observing and practicing. Executives that use corporate strategy have found that it builds a strong corporate culture through facilitating knowledge sharing throughout all levels of the organization.

Corporate strategy focuses on defining and recognizing core knowledge areas, coordinating expert opinions, sharing organizational knowledge, and scanning for new knowledge to keep the quality of their products or services continuously improving. Corporate strategy, therefore, is an essential requirement of corporate culture by which knowledge is shared among people.

However, executives may lack the required corporate strategy to interact with other organizations or distrust sharing their knowledge. Executives are, therefore, clearly the right focal point for developing networking with environmental components by adopting corporate strategy to develop relationships and interactions. The key here is to inspire their organizations as a whole to develop networking with more effective enterprises through employing corporate strategy directed at connecting knowledge with other companies. Executives are finding that corporate strategy creates a shared understanding of problems which can develop an effective corporate culture that enhances the knowledge sharing process.

Through the corporate strategy, executives could build a climate inspiring followers to share their knowledge, and facilitate the knowledge sharing process. Thus, executives can apply corporate strategy to enhance knowledge sharing among human capital and stipulate knowledge to be shared around the organization and with other companies.

Global leaders can now see how they not only can directly support corporate strategy, but it can also cultivate an effective strategic decision-making process, which will enable corporate culture within organizations. Executives can also see that cultivating an effective strategic plan coupled with cultural issues requires developing leadership within organizations—not only at the higher echelons of the organization but at every level. Thus, in light of the increased pressures of the global workplace that inspires leaders to exert effective change at the organizational level, this article points out the vital importance of business leadership in reshaping an organization’s strategy to have access to higher performing culture within organizations. This article also suggests that corporate strategy and corporate culture constitute the foundation of a supportive workplace to improve business success and reduce operational risk.

Standing on the shoulders of scholars before us, I indicate that corporate strategy and corporate culture are major resources for business success and support the positive impact of these two vital factors on business success.

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Mostafa Sayyadi works with senior business leaders to effectively develop innovation in companies and helps companies—from start-ups to the Fortune 100—succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders. He is a business book author and a long-time contributor to business publications and his work has been featured in top-flight business publications.

talent

Corporate Culture, Knowledge Management and Talent Management: How Are They Linked?

This article portrays a more detailed picture of the effects of corporate culture on knowledge management and talent management that have been mentioned but not placed in a model in the past.

How Corporate Culture Elevates Knowledge Management?

Culture is the resource that builds upon the foundation that helps organizations prosper. Edgar Schein, one of the prominent management scholars, describes corporate culture as a “pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.

Corporate culture is, therefore, reflected in shared assumptions, symbols, beliefs, values, and norms that specify how employees understand problems and appropriately react to them.

Executives can manifest themselves as change agents who manipulate corporate culture with the aim of improving knowledge management. Organizational culture includes three dimensions of collaboration, trust, and learning. Executives can facilitate collaboration by developing relationships in organizations. Executives can contribute to the cultural aspect of trust, by considering both employee’s individual interests and the company’s essential needs. Also, executives identify the individual needs of their employees and develop a learning culture by intellectually stimulating them to generate new knowledge and share it with others. Executives can, therefore, highly manipulate a firm’s culture to conform to the needs and expectations of strategic goals and objectives.

Knowledge management is enhanced by providing further opportunities and information sharing. Executives can enhance knowledge sharing by providing access to knowledge, and stimulate new ideas and knowledge generation, transfer an individual’s knowledge to other members and departments and improve knowledge capturing, storing, and accumulating, aiming at achieving organizational goals. Executives can propel knowledge sharing in the company to generate more innovative ideas and solutions for new and demanding issues that come up constantly in our hypercompetitive economic environment. By doing this, executives can build a strong corporate culture to share experiences gained by imitating, observing, and practicing.

Executives have found that corporate culture impacts knowledge management through facilitating knowledge sharing throughout all levels of the organization. Corporate culture focuses on defining and recognizing core knowledge areas, sharing organizational knowledge, and scanning for new knowledge to keep the quality of their product or services continuously improving. Therefore, corporate culture is an essential requirement of corporate learning by which knowledge is shared among people.

Particularly, the three cultural aspects of collaboration, trust, and learning play a critical role in enhancing the effectiveness of corporate learning. For example, collaboration provides a shared understanding of the current issues and problems among employees, which helps to generate new ideas within organizations. Trust towards their leader’s decisions is a necessary precursor to creating new knowledge. The key is for executives to inculcate a culture of trust and transparency of knowledge sharing within organizations so that information can be found and used instantaneously.

Moreover, the amount of time spent learning is positively related to the amount of knowledge gained, shared, and implemented. Therefore, executives can reshape, and in some cases, manipulate corporate culture to facilitate corporate learning within departmental and business units of organizations. Executives can now see how corporate culture constitutes the foundation of a supportive workplace to share and synthesize organizational knowledge and subsequently limit the gaps between success and possible failure.

How Knowledge Management Elevates Talent Management

Executives have found that knowledge management is modifying behaviors resulting in newer insight and knowledge. Changing the existing behaviors of followers generating new knowledge is a key factor in improving a firm’s competitive advantage. This is a fact but it happens through the way talented employees are managed by executives. Why is this, you may ask? Because knowledge management is a process that leads to acquiring new insights and knowledge, and potentially to correct sub-optimal or ineffective actions and behaviors that cause companies to spiral out of control.

Executives need to first support this approach for knowledge management. Talent management in organizations is the ultimate outcome of the knowledge management by which it is created and acquired by connecting with others that want to share successes and failures. This leads to converting acquired knowledge into organizational processes and activities to improve or discontinue processes that either contribute or inhibit success. Many executives see talent management as an outcome of various factors such as knowledge management and a climate inspiring innovation and creativity within organizations. However, a more comprehensive approach needs to be introduced to put together the various aspects of potential contributions to talent management.

Knowledge management requires various processes such as knowledge acquisition, collaboration, dissemination, sharing, generation, and storage to acquire knowledge within an organization. A question remains: how can we establish the relationship between knowledge management and talent management?

Well, there are scholars that highlight the strategic role of knowledge management in enhancing the effectiveness of talent management. For example, one scholar by the name of Bayyavarapu at the University of Western Ontario suggests a learning-based approach to talent management to understand how knowledge management is related to various practices of talent management. More importantly, the effective implementation of talent management requires the sharing of best practices and experiences among employees. Knowledge management improves organizational processes by sharing knowledge that can increase both follower engagement and personal development.

Executives can, in fact, enhance knowledge management when they would like to concentrate on sharing it to empower followers in order to build a learning climate. Most importantly, knowledge is managed through “learning by doing” which is more engaging. Executives around the globe realize that they play a critical role to achieve the best learning climate and for improving knowledge management that creates learning and growing the organization. Engaging followers and getting them to participate in knowledge management activities is an important part of talent management. Thus, knowledge management positively impacts the effectiveness of talent management through facilitating knowledge sharing by all executives and employees of the organization. Shared knowledge can contribute to the development of a learning organization in which people continuously grow and develop both personally and professionally. Executives require people who are engaged and inspired to meet the demands of day-to-day operations.

For now, executives can develop conducive learning climates that foster collaboration and knowledge management in which knowledge is shared and exploited. Unshared knowledge is like lettuce in the refrigerator—if eaten and shared, everyone enjoys it, if not, it could go bad and not have any use. Executives found that shared knowledge enables companies to improve knowledge management, and that talent management is highly dependent on stimulating continuous learning within organizations. Executives play a crucial role in elevating talent management by enhancing knowledge management to empower employees to pursue organizational goals.

The following figure provides a snapshot of how executives steering corporate culture enhance knowledge management and talent management.

In Conclusion

Insufficient consideration of the impact of knowledge management on the organization’s talent management has been also exposed. Thus, I suggest that scholars take our ideas and continue to conduct research using executives as the focal point so that academic scholarship can meet the needs of managerial implications at the higher echelons of organizations worldwide.

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Mostafa Sayyadi works with senior business leaders to effectively develop innovation in companies and helps companies—from start-ups to the Fortune 100—succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders. He is a business book author and a long-time contributor to business publications and his work has been featured in top-flight business publications.

consultants

How Management Consultants Can Fix Knowledge Management

There is a scientific, philosophical, and organizational side to knowledge that executives should at least be aware of in today’s hypercompetitive business environment. Scientific knowledge is objective and manifests itself as provable and verifiable knowledge or truth, while philosophical knowledge clarifies that truth is inaccessible. The key for executives is that organizational knowledge, unlike scientific and philosophical knowledge, focuses on enhancing effective performance. Answering the questions executives often ask: “What works?”

Based on this view, this kind of knowledge empowers the capabilities of an organization, and actively improves its competitive advantage in the marketplace. Executives are already aware that organizational knowledge takes an objective approach and can positively contribute to a firm’s performance. This is why executives care whether knowledge is organizational or not? The simple answer is that if organizational knowledge is not shared and managed, companies may become obsolete, taken over, or acquired. The key is how to use this knowledge, enhance it, distribute it, and capture it.

Every executive is held to the grindstone of maximizing financial and non-financial measures—their careers are tied to company performance measures. Every executive also knows that company performance measures can illustrate whether knowledge management is contributing to bottom-line improvement. This article articulates a different approach and introduces a new perspective of knowledge management by showing how knowledge management consultants can help companies to better manage knowledge, meaning that organizational knowledge is power and can be used as an asset when competing with rivals. This is my experience of working with a team of top-level management consultants around the globe.

Consultants can look at three-step processes of knowledge accumulation, integration, and reconfiguration. This model to managing knowledge reflects a more strategic and practical perspective, as it is process-oriented and most applicable in the context of leading organizations. Consultants know that applying this model is advantageous and good sound strategic implementation. In this model, organizational knowledge is accumulated by creating new knowledge from organizational intellectual capital and acquiring knowledge from external environments. In the process of knowledge accumulation, the exchange of knowledge with external business partners can develop innovative environments.

Consultants can play a strategic role in expanding knowledge accumulation by applying incentives as mechanisms to develop a more innovative climate and managing effective tools to acquire knowledge from external sources. They can particularly develop a workplace which is highly effective in:

-Acquiring knowledge about new products/services within our industry.

-Benchmarking performance with competitors or industry.

-Using feedback to improve subsequent practices.

-Utilizing teams (e.g. committees or management teams) to manage knowledge resources.

-Developing and implementing education or training programs.

-Carrying out a career path program or recruitment program to acquire experts.

-Conducting organizational events (such as a “knowledge contest” or “knowledge fair”) that promote knowledge activities.

Secondly, consultants can improve knowledge integration by facilitating knowledge sharing around the organization. In fact, they can positively impact knowledge integration by creating expert groups and enhancing dynamic relationships among employees and departments and within companies. A systematic process of coordinating company-wide experts will enable companies by developing a more innovative climate within organizations. Further, it can be seen that some qualities indicating a high-performing expert group (such as trust and reciprocity) are highly overlapped with the definition of organizational effectiveness describing organizational capabilities in creating trust and reciprocity. Based on this view, it could be argued that effective coordination of company-wide experts itself can provide a significant contribution to organizational effectiveness, thereby developing a climate that all leaders aim to create. In particular, consultants can develop a workplace which is highly effective in:

-Monitoring or controlling organizational knowledge to keep products or services in line with market requirements.

-Regularly assessing knowledge requirements according to environmental changes.

-Linking the knowledge sharing system using various software and programs.

-Defining “core knowledge” or “core competence” areas.

-Using expert groups to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of organizational knowledge.

-Disseminating organizational knowledge among employees.

-Rewarding individuals or teams based on the quality of knowledge generated.

Thirdly, the knowledge within organizations needs to be reconfigured to meet environmental changes and new challenges. In this process, knowledge is globally shared with other organizations in the environment. Consultants can promote knowledge reconfiguration by improving networking with external sources and developing relationships. Further, they can also inspire organizational members to network with more successful companies. It is evident that networking with external business partners improves effectiveness, thereby providing directions for chief executive officers to develop a more effective corporate vision incorporating various concerns and values of external business partners.

Moreover, it is believed that networking with other companies contributes to the effectiveness of learning, which in turn empowers human resources by creating new knowledge and solutions. Accordingly, the process of knowledge reconfiguration can play a crucial role in enhancing organizational effectiveness. Especially at the corporate level, consultants can develop a workplace which is highly effective in:

-Creating knowledge alliances with suppliers, customers, or other partners.

-Sharing knowledge management visions and goals with external partners (such as suppliers and customers or other partners) to develop collaborative activities, shared goals, and trust-based relationships with them.

-Extending (or linking) knowledge-related policies or rules (measurement, rewards) with external partners (such as customers, suppliers, or other partners).

-Linking our knowledge-sharing system with external partners (such as customers, suppliers, or other partners).

-Facilitating and implementing activities such as conferences, contests, seminars with external partners.

In conclusion, organizational knowledge must be guarded and not shared with the competition. Any leak of such information may expose the organization and increase the operational risk. The three processes of knowledge management mentioned above, when carried out correctly, can prevent further operational risk in today’s knowledge-based economy.

One important dimension that all leaders world-wide can learn from this article is that knowledge management consultants can help clients’ companies to address the current gaps in knowledge management performance and improve their competitiveness in today’s uncertain business environment.

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Mostafa Sayyadi works with senior business leaders to effectively develop innovation in companies and helps companies—from start-ups to the Fortune 100—succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders. He is a business book author and a long-time contributor to business publications and his work has been featured in top-flight business publications.

company

How To Build A High-Performance Company

There are some executives that like to look at academic journals but unfortunately, the crossover literature has not reached them enough. I attempt to blend scholarly concepts with real-world applications. For the executive’s corner, I place a great deal of emphasis on the literature of leadership and information technology as two significant indicators for financial performance. This article adds to a relatively small body of literature but pays homage to the scholarly contributions. I highlight the direct impact of leadership on financial performance, and also simultaneously portray the indirect contribution of leadership in improving organizational outcomes by implementing information technology as another important component of organizational performance. This article actually investigates the crossover potential of scholarly research and how it can be applied in the organizational boardroom.

Executives will also see that cultivating effective technological initiatives requires developing leadership within companies—not only at the higher echelons of the company but at every level. In light of the increased pressures of the global workplace that inspires executives to exert effective change at the organizational level, this article points out the vital importance of leadership in reshaping and, in some cases, manipulating a company’s internal resources to have access to higher performing technology within firms.

The focus of this article is based upon the critical role of leadership which allows a rich basis for understanding the mechanisms by which knowledge management and financial performance are influenced. Scholars repeatedly uncovered leadership impacts on knowledge management and financial performance. This article articulates a different approach. I simply extended the current literature by showing how executives can contribute to knowledge management and financial performance by fostering effective technological platforms. These two factors coupled with leadership are presented as a new approach for executive implementation.

I also suggest that executives embrace leadership. Leadership influences some of the spans of control of executive responsibility. My primary focus is on one factor (i.e. information technology) but there are many more important components of the managerial function that can be enhanced when leadership is embraced. The key here is that there are positive effects of information technology on knowledge management and financial performance.

Executives will also see that I expand upon the subject matter of a company’s internal resources. Through articulating the impacts of leadership on information technology, I add to the current and extant literature. Insufficient consideration of the impact of leadership on the companies’ internal resources has been exposed and I attempt to address this concern for the first time. For executives, this article can portray a more detailed picture of the effects of leadership on information technology, knowledge management, and financial performance that have been mentioned but not placed in a model in the past.

Leadership and Information Technology

The only thing we know is technological change is on the rise. With the inception of new technology, while services become obsolete so quickly today, executives are staid with managing the future that is somewhat evasive.

Executives can develop relationships and interactions within companies, set desired expectations, and inspire employees to identify further opportunities in their business environment. When executives view information technology as a vital important organizational resource that facilitates organizational communications and improves the search for knowledge, they begin to see opportunities for successful business ventures.

Executives also spend a great deal of time conceptualizing strategic endeavors. Scholars affirm that the strategic role of leadership is enhanced when the implementation of information technology successfully occurs at the right time and place. Thus, executives raise the levels of awareness on the importance of technology and empower employees to improve the effectiveness of information technology implementation within corporations. Therefore, executives can positively affect information technology implementation within companies. Executives must understand that leadership can highly support information technology to improve knowledge management and financial performance and, therefore, remain competitive.

Leadership and Financial Performance

Executives develop organizational communications aimed at providing valuable resources for all employees. Thus, executives can enhance knowledge sharing among employees and stipulate knowledge to be shared around the company. Sharing the best practices and experiences could positively impact some aspects of organizational performance such as innovation, providing learning, and growth opportunities for employees. Empowered employees can also enable a firm to actively respond to environmental changes and collective-interests. The key idea is to identify employee’s needs and show concern for both organizational needs and employee’s interests concurrently.

When executives show concern for the employee’s individual needs, individuals begin to contribute more commitment and they become more inspired them to put extra effort into their work. This extra effort improves the quality of services, customer satisfaction, and impacts the return on assets, sales, shareholder value, and improves operational risk management.

Executives can also inspire employees by setting highly desired expectations. The higher level of follower expectation can enhance productivity and perhaps decrease organizational costs. Scholars agree that executives positively affect financial performance through improving the price of stock, decreasing costs, increasing sales, improving innovation, increasing the rate of responses to environmental changes, improving the quality of services, along with a stronger customer focus and developing learning opportunities for employees. Thus, leadership is positively associated with companies’ financial performance.

Information Technology and Financial Performance

Information technology significantly contributes to corporations’ financial performance. Scholars acknowledge that information technology is an important enabler to effectively implement organizational processes. Communication technologies can, in fact, reduce paper-based transactions for companies that can potentially decrease costs and subsequently improve profitability for companies. Furthermore, it can be seen that communication technologies contribute to companies to effectively identify opportunities in the business environment that leads to identifying the best opportunities for investment in the industry that potentially leads to improve financial performance for companies in terms of return on investment (ROI).

Decision-aid technologies as another kind of information technology can also help companies to effectively create more innovative solutions for their organizational problems. Executives can, therefore, build a high-performance company through implementing information technology.

Information Technology and Knowledge Management

Information Technology is the new competitive advantage, and the companies that embrace it will survive while those that do not will find their companies facing possible acquisition. Information technology is a resource for knowledge management. With knowledge management, executives can sustain current operations while preparing future endeavors. Information technology, as a competitive resource, encourages employees to embark on technological facilities such as shared electronic workspaces to provide new ideas and possible solutions for solving problems. Problems that may leave a company to debunk and less competitive.

Scholars found that the lack of innovative workplaces adversely impacts on the company’s capability to manage knowledge, and they suggest that companies use information technology to successfully facilitate knowledge management. Information technology plays a critical role in managing knowledge by executives and is also aligned with the knowledge-based view of the firm which not only builds upon the dissemination of information but also how it is restored and retrieved.

The following figure provides a snapshot of how executives steering information technology enhances goal achievement.

 

Some Lessons for Executives

This article theorizes that leadership has significant effects on information technology. It follows that cultivating effective impacts on information technology is assisted by developing leadership within companies. The practical contribution of this article lies in explaining how executives influence information technology.

This article suggests that information technology constitutes the foundation of a supportive framework to improve knowledge management and financial performance. In fact, it can be argued that if information technology is not completely supportive of knowledge management, companies cannot expect to benefit fully from knowledge management projects. Both in theory and in practice, information technology is depicted as an important enabler for knowledge management and financial performance.

Scholars noted that a strong alignment exists between the success of knowledge management projects and information technology implementation and found that knowledge management projects are more likely to succeed when companies develop and use broader technological infrastructures. This article goes further and provides elaborative insights for executives by modeling how information technology mediates the relationship between leadership, knowledge management, and financial performance.

This article reveals that executives actively deploy this organizational resource (i.e. information technology) to improve knowledge management, and it is quite understandable that leaders are better suited to enable knowledge management projects within companies through channeling knowledge management efforts into employing supportive information technology. Therefore, this article suggests that it is critical that executives understand that leadership supports information technology implementation to effectively manage knowledge management projects.

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Mostafa Sayyadi works with senior business leaders to effectively develop innovation in companies and helps companies—from start-ups to the Fortune 100—succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders. He is a business book author and a long-time contributor to business publications and his work has been featured in top-flight business publications.

knowledge management

Why Knowledge Management is Important to the Success of Your Company

Executives today are more focused on strategic management decision making due to the hypercompetitive global environment and the public and private sector evaluation and opinion. Executes still wonder where is knowledge and how can it be captured, utilized, and enhanced when it comes to decision-making. Executives found that within organizations, knowledge resides in various areas such as management, employees, culture, structure, systems, processes, and relationships, and its role is to enhance organizational functions.

Executives across the globe have found that knowledge is critical to business success. Knowledge, in of itself, is not enough to satisfy the vast array of changes in today’s organization. Therefore, knowledge management is only a necessary precursor to effectively managing knowledge within the organization.

First executives must understand the concept of organizational knowledge itself. Organizational knowledge cannot merely be described as the sum of individual knowledge, but as a systematic combination of knowledge based on social interactions shared among organizational members. Executives can categorize followers based on their human knowledge which focuses on individual knowledge and manifests itself in an individual’s competencies and skills. Executives, being more conceptual, agree with Haridimos Tsoukas who determines organizational knowledge as a collective mind, and Kiku Jones and Lori Leonard who explain organizational knowledge as the knowledge that exists in the organization as a whole. Most importantly, organizational knowledge is owned and disseminated by the organization.

The key take-away for executives is that knowledge is a resource that enables organizations to solve problems and create value through improved performance and it is this point that will narrow the gaps of success and failure leading to more successful decision-making. The key is for executives to convert individual knowledge into valuable resources to ensure that the knowledge is actually helping the organization grow both professionally for individuals and profitably for all stakeholders.

Companies are increasingly investing in knowledge management projects. But knowledge management in companies is still quite limited. Knowledge management can help companies identify their inefficiencies in organizational processes, and subsequently recover them on an instantaneous basis which enables executives to prevent further operational risk. The question remains. How does knowledge management impact executive success?

Executive success is tantamount to organizational performance and in many cases, their salary is concurrently determined on organizational success. By combining knowledge management and executive success, executives are able to answer the questions necessary to apply knowledge management without having to delve through all the models and theories to find what works well for them and what does not. Knowledge is firstly accumulated by creating new knowledge from organizational intellectual capital and acquiring knowledge from external environments.

This knowledge exchange with external business partners develops innovative environments that can enable executives to create a more innovative climate in companies. The knowledge management process enhances the capabilities of executives to play the role of inspirational motivation, which enables executives to directly set highly desired expectations to recognize possible opportunities in the business environment. The knowledge exchange also positively contributes to executives to develop a more effective vision, including a more comprehensive array of information and insights about external environments.

Executives then integrate knowledge internally to enhance the effectiveness and efficiencies in various systems and processes, as well as to be more responsive to market changes. Knowledge integration focuses on monitoring and evaluating knowledge management practices, coordinating experts, sharing knowledge, and scanning the changes of knowledge requirements to keep the quality of their products or services in-line with market demand. It is apparent that knowledge integration activities can help executives assessing the required changes to keep the quality of both products and services at maximum levels. Furthermore, a systematic process of coordinating company-wide experts enables executives to propel the role of intellectual stimulation, which creates a more innovative environment within companies.

Executives must also curtail knowledge within organizations. The knowledge within organizations needs to be reconfigured to meet environmental changes and new challenges today. What worked yesterday or a few years ago is changing rapidly as technology has increased in a prolific way. Knowledge is globally shared with other organizations through domestic and global rewards such as the Malcolm Baldridge Award in the United States and the Deming Award in Japan. However, past studies have posited that companies might lack the required capabilities or decide to decline from interacting acting with other companies or even suffer the distrust to share their knowledge. Therefore, expert groups may not have sufficient diversity in order to comprehend knowledge acquired from external sources.

Based upon these limitations whether natural or caused, networking with business partners is a key activity for companies to enhance knowledge exchange and it should not take an award to be the impetus to initiate interaction. Ergo, networking with external business partners may enhance executive success, thereby empowering executives to better develop strategic insights to develop a more effective vision incorporating various concerns and values of external business partners.

The knowledge transference among companies itself improves the effectiveness of learning, which in turn enables executives to empower human resources by creating new knowledge and solutions. Thus, I suggest that networking takes place among companies in both domestic and international markets which may lead to enhance the effective use of leadership. Therefore, if executives in senior positions effectively use knowledge management then they may be able to improve executive success through increased learning opportunities.

In conclusion, this article actually investigates the crossover potential of scholarly research and how it can be applied in the organizational boardroom. I offer practical contributions to managers at all levels of the organization. This article introduces a new and dynamic perspective of knowledge management within organizations, and adds to a relatively small body of literature but pays homage to the scholarly contributions. I stress that knowledge is a strategic resource for organizational portfolios.

This article suggests that knowledge management constitutes the foundation of a supportive workplace to improve executive success and reduce operational risk. The key here is that there are positive effects of knowledge management on executive success. I highlight the direct impact of knowledge management on executive success by facilitating important components of performance. When business leaders ensure executive success they increase control and lesson operational risk. In fact, I suggest that if knowledge management initiatives are not completely in favor of supporting organizational processes, companies may become obsolete, taken over, or acquired.

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Mostafa Sayyadi works with senior business leaders to effectively develop innovation in companies and helps companies—from start-ups to the Fortune 100—succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders. He is a business book author and a long-time contributor to business publications and his work has been featured in top-flight business publications.