Loss of knowledge LO14788

Ray Evans Harrell (mcore@IDT.NET)
Fri, 29 Aug 1997 10:41:22 -0700

Replying to LO14775 --

Marc Sacks wrote:

> However, anyone who is fired or
> laid off must leave immediately, and one the factors a company must
> consider when terminating people is this knowledge loss. Too often people
> are fired for political or economic reasons by management whose short-term
> thinking blinds them to the consequences of their actions.

>From a person in the arts, I have always thought that using layoffs as an
immediate response to economic problems basically showed that complex
knowledge was not that important in business. In my "business" laying
off a flutist means you can't play anything that involves the flute and
training a new one from within the organization can take years because of
the skill complexity.

My deduction was that if a company could replace someone on a job so
easily then the job must not involve much intellectual capital. Obviously
this is changing. As this changes I have hopes for a much more mature
attitude on the part of company management. Perhaps we can now escape the
purely venal and begin to contemplate the meaning of what it means to
develop a secure, efficient company architecture. i.e. what it means to
have and cultivate a complex highly skilled company community.

>From the other side, that has also been alluded to on this list. There
will have to be legal responses to itinerant individuals simply using
companies as schools and then leaving.

Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York
http://www.freeyellow.com/members/mccony/
mcore@idt.net

-- 

Ray Evans Harrell <mcore@IDT.NET>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>