David H. Smith, head of knowledge development at Unilever, offers the following symptoms of poor brainpower management:
- You repeat problems
- Work gets duplicated
- Customer relations are strained
- Good ideas don’t get shared
- You have to compete on price
- You can’t keep up with market leaders
- You’re dependent on key individuals
- You’re slow to launch new products
- You don’t know how to price for service[i]
[i] Steward, Thomas, “Why Dumb Things Happen to Smart Companies,” Fortune, June 23, 1997, pp. 159-160.