There were a number of major KM Conferences held in the Asia Pacific region in the closing period of 2008, notably in Singapore, Australia, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.
A panel of HKKMS members and friends of the Society met to discuss and debate the main issues raised to provide members a perspective on where KM is at present and where it is headed in the region.
At first sight, it might seem that the current financial crisis has no connection to intellectual capital, but in fact there is a strong relationship between the two. Troops of people take care of financial capital and the result of their activities is monitoring the flows of this resource and its effectiveness. At the same time, intellectual capital has no such treatment.
Monitoring of value creation efficiency of that resource does not really exist. What is done resembles to what was done with manual work before Taylor. In business reality, this is featured by the fact that many firms achieve revenue and profit but, at the same time, a fall of value creation efficiency is happening. It is similar to a landing plane: while still flying, height is gradually decreasing. Although this situation is normal for planes, it is fatal for companies. Bankruptcy is the last stage of that downwards flight and it happens easily when intellectual capital performance is ignored. One of the ways to fight the crisis, that has not
reached its peak yet, is raising the efficiency of intellectual capital. Increasing value creation efficiency of intellectual capital by better utilisation of existing intellectual resources is the cheapest way of fighting financial crisis.
We were really delighted to be able to invite everyone to a special lunch event in November of 2008 with an international speaker from an organisation renowned for the application of Knowledge Management — the World Bank.
The World Bank’s mission requires a global strategy to share knowledge effectively and to ensure that people who need that knowledge get it on time, whether from the World Bank or other organisations. Sharing knowledge enables the World Bank to respond faster to client needs, deliver a quality
product, encourage innovation, and continually introducenew services to its clients. These goals are of course shared by most businesses.
The talk by Nicolas Gorjestani, a former World Bank CKO, was certainly a highlight of the year for the HKKMS. His insights were very special and quite inspiring. Nicolas was in HK for only 24 hours so it was the only chance to see him at that time. Luckily for us, he came back later in 2009 to speak again.