Johannes Müller - Senior Director of Knowledge Management at Siemens

how do you explain knowledge management? Yeah, this is a very good introduction question.

And I will reply to this with a quite provocative answer.

I would say the term knowledge management is somehow wrong because already Peter Drucker stated you can't manage knowledge.

Knowledge is between two ears and only between two ears.

And maybe Peter Drucker is right in the sense of tacit knowledge, but maybe he's wrong in the sense of explicit knowledge.

But I make it more precise.

I state another researcher.

It's Thomas Wilson from the London University.

And he said it more clearly.

Knowledge management is an umbrella term for a variety of organizational activities, none of which are concerned with the management of knowledge.

Those activities that are not concerned with the management of information are concerned with the management of work practices.

And the expectation that changes in such areas as communication practice will enable information sharing.

So this brings us to the point.

And yeah, to really answer your questions, I refer to the Yeah, to the interestingly German Wikipedia definition.

It's really on the German page.

I will translate it into English.

And it says, knowledge management is the methodical influence on the knowledge base of an organization or an individual.

And this is describing it very well from my point of view, because what I do is to influence by some methods people or IT systems or the whole organization and enable or let's better say motivate them to exchange knowledge and to learn from each other.

This more or less describes my work, but it's definitely not the management of tacit knowledge.

Uh, I, so I, I agree with you to like the 99th percentile, but there, there is a point where perhaps you're not managing the actual knowledge, but you're, you're managing the exchange of that knowledge, right? Even if it's between two people getting the right two people in the room or finding the person that holds the knowledge and getting it to others.

Come on.

I mean, Johnny, give me, give me a little something here.

There's a little, otherwise I'm, I'm, uh, clearly need to go look for another job if if we're not managing knowledge.

No, no, not at all.

Not at all.