(P.S. Read part 2 and part 3.)
Knowledge management is an ancient field and a brand new field.
Long ago, memorization was the original record-keeping. Chief among the Greek muses was Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and mother to all other muses of the arts. Legends and poems were written for oral storytelling, so memory was indeed the birth source of other art. Math was more difficult to keep track of, so ancient civilizations used knotted cords with a designated system to represent numbers. This allowed them to collect taxes, take census records, and organize militaries en masse, so these cord counters could run up to a thousand ropes in a bundle. Farther back than most people realize, life was less blazes of glory and more a logistical pain in the ass.
Today, as people coalesce into ever-denser cities, it’s hard to find an inch of daily life that hasn’t been barcoded and bureaucratized. If we were blindfolded and dropped into any city in the world, we’d look for the painted lines and colored lights that tell us it’s safe to cross the street. Mailing a package, we trust that in three days it will find its way from a city post box to someone’s front porch across the world, just based on five lines on an address label. Planning leisure time, we use crowd-sourced reviews and infinite free content for inspiration - even for free, we expect and demand a certain level of integrity to the information we consume, always raising the bar for what we should have at our fingertips.
And yet you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t groan about how disorganized things can be. Especially at work, it can be annoying and even impossible to get some things done. In a world where everything is faster, closer, and easier than ever, there is a rising chaos in parallel.
Good luck comprehending all those changes your old coworker made, right before they left six months ago, on this project you’re being told to take over. Dare you actually text them to ask, since they said you could? Not really an option. Just work with what you have. Training a new intern? Better hope you saved that checklist the old one made last year after she finally figured out the convoluted reporting system that none of the senior people have used for years. Hold that thought, because the department upstairs wants to ask about that exception your team made for a client last year. They want to do the same for another client and it’d be nice to use your documentation as precedent. Hopefully someone included the client’s name in the document title because if you have to filter through all these generic file names left by six years of different employees, you’ll have to cancel the rest of your day.
One at a time, these things would be easy to do. But we are no longer just counting heads and keeping ledgers. We run global supply chains. We no longer pass down antiquity by word of mouth, but build social networks that close the distance between opposite ends of the world.
Human capital, once hopelessly exploited as the cheapest resource, now has the chance to vote with its feet. More than a few institutions have learned the hard way what a brain drain is, and felt their foundations crack.
So although we can trace its long history by different names, knowledge management is also a brand new field that has yet to graft itself to modernity. If we want to keep having nice things, we can’t afford to lose the maintenance and stewardship of our collective intellectual progress.
Here’s where you can develop a secret weapon. School doesn’t teach you things you need for a job, like knowledge management, despite all the knowledge it crams into you. Although that’s a controversy for another day, it teaches us two lessons for getting ahead.
Lesson one: A lot of people never learned, and never will learn, how to run a system effectively based on sound principles of organization and efficiency. If you become good at this fundamental skill - making processes for getting things done - you will never be limited in what you can do. You’ll not only work faster with fewer mistakes and less stress, but also communicate and delegate easily to others, multiplying your personal power by however many friends you can make. Other people will have their blood, sweat, and tears, but you’ll have the ability to solve any problem.
Lesson two: If you honor knowledge, it will bless you with rewards that money can’t buy. Knowledge, being so revered in academia and given so much lip service by everyone and their neighbor, is not as respected as you’d think. The proof is in the way we treat some of the most knowledgeable people in the business world: secretaries.
Although secretaries occupy the center of every spoke in the business wheel, often gatekeeping exclusive information about helpful contacts, creative solutions, and historical experience, they are frequently treated like they have nothing to offer but rudimentary mindless labor. Besides the fact that you should just be nice to people, those who can see past lazy social hierarchies, to where the knowledge hides in plain sight, will get the goodies. Because school is not nearly enough to prepare you for big things, you can never afford to stop learning, and knowledge doesn’t care where you are in the pyramid.
In fact, graduating from school just means you’re now a freshman in your own MBA program of life. Anyone who tells you that work is firstly about work, not about personal gains like learning or networking or growth, is misguided at best and malicious at worst. Watch closely and you’ll notice that the people with the blood, sweat, and tears and the people who are actually working don’t overlap as often as you’d think. You can do what you’re told and hope you gambled on the right employer, or you can make the excruciating but guaranteed investment in thinking for yourself.
Because knowledge management is the unglamorous and neglected backbone of business, this secret weapon sets us far ahead and apart from anyone else. It allows us to harness everything and everyone that has come before, refracting our own talent into infinite possibilities. That is how to win.
Don’t panic if these abstract ideas seem out of reach. We’ll break it down step by step with practical applications. Stay tuned for the next post, share with your friends and family, and subscribe to careercatadvice.substack.com to get future posts right away!
