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Executive Interviews: Interview with Anil K Gupta on Knowledge Management
June 2008 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Anil K Gupta
Anil K Gupta is the Ralph J Tyser Professor of Strategy
Organization at the Smith School of Business,
The University of Maryland at College Park.

Generally, people like to share their success stories and they take pride when these success stories are converted into best practices and are emulated. However, the very same peoplemay not like to share their failures for the fear of ignominy, loss of credibility, etc. But failures do offer important lessons and therefore, how do you get people to share their failures so that failures are dissected and lessons are learnt?
The key factor is how failures are treatedwithin the company. If failures are treated as indicators of poor management, then not only will people hide them but they will also become very conservative and stop

engaging in experimentation. On the other hand, if failures are treated as a normal outcome of experimentation, then people will be happy to experiment and to be open to sharing them and learning from them. In the book chapter that I referred to above, we have an interesting quotation from Ken Iverson, the-then CEO and architect of Nucor: "We try to impress upon our employees that we are not King Solomon. We use an expression that I really like, and that is good managers make bad decisions.We believe that if you take an average person and put him in a management position, he'll make 50% good decisions and 50% bad decisions. A good manager makes 60% good decisions. That means 40% of those decisions could have been better. We continually tell our employees that it is their responsibility to the company to let the managers know when they make those 40% decisions that could have been better.The only other point I'd like to make about decision-making is, don't keep making the same bad decisions Every Nucor plant has its little storehouse of equipment that was bought, tried, and discarded. The knowledge we gather from our so-called failures may lead us to spectacular success."

1. Knowledge Management Case Studies
2. ICMR Case Collection
3. Case Study Volumes

The Interview was conducted by Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary, Consulting Editor, Effective Executive and Dean, IBSCDC, Hyderabad.

This Interview was originally published in Effective Executive, IUP, June 2008.

Copyright © June 2008, IBSCDC No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced or distributed, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or medium electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the permission of IBSCDC.

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Interview with Anil K Gupta on Knowledge Management