The cult of disposability during the reengineering craze changed the work landscape for good. Loyalty is sometimes hard to find. Here’s the rub. Knowledge management needs cooperative workers to share their knowledge. The question for the Brand U organization: ‘Is how do we gather, organize, refine, and commercialize our knowledge?’ The personal Brand U question is even more intriguing: ‘If I have the knowledge, why should I share it with my employer and why not commercialize it myself?’
Another challenge in knowledge management is the phobia of sharing valuable information in organizations, which reward individual contributors who have special knowledge. Individual excellers in many organizations seem to keep their jobs or expand their influence. Team players get congeniality awards. And, sharers get pink slipped.