Tools for Knowledge Nomads

EverFile solves a problem for knowledge nomads: fragmentation of career, school, and personal records across separate, non-compatible information management tools.

With EverFile everything is in one place, in one comprehensive, easy-to-use system, available by subscription. No more searching for papers or trying to remember names or dates. Information is easily entered or uploaded into structured file areas.

• Work and career history and performance, plus career planning
• Education and training Military service
• Community and volunteer work
• Personal information

The heart of EverFile is its docking utility. A subscriber docks her/his system to exchange information and build a joint record with organizations such as employers, clients, partners, schools, or associations. When it is time to move on the subscriber undocks and takes a copy of the joint record within her/his portable, personal EverFile record. At the next port of call the EverFile System is docked again. Over time a cumulative record is built.

The EverFile portable, personal record enables the subscriber to manage information over her/his lifetime in order to present skills, experience, achievements, and contribution value.

Comments

[Jerry Krause]

I am a recovering academic. But one academic addiction I have not yet overcome is the topic of the “decline in we-ness” in society. So, here I go again….

The increase in the number of knowledge workers in today’s workforce has focused attention on one aspect of this complex issue. The first commitment of knowledge workers is to applying and growing their professional knowledge and expertise. While money is important, it is actually secondary to the importance of applying and growing their knowledge and expertise. Knowledge workers tend to withdraw their commitment to, and “we-identification” with employing organizations when the organization frustrates or does not facilitate the knowledge worker’s ability to apply and grow their knowledge and expertise. This withdrawal often results in mobility of knowledge workers, AKA knowledge nomadism.

My daughter’s experience is an example of this. Her professional expertise is in diversity management in the field of human resources. She has left numerous employing organizations because they did not afford her the opportunity to apply and develop her professional expertise.

Pittinsky and Shih’s research suggests that employing organizations often use the wrong approach to address the knowledge nomadism issue. They often use ineffective strategies designed to RETAIN knowledge workers rather than more effective strategies designed to UNLEASH their PROFESSIONAL COMMITMENT. They use strategies to retain them, like “increase salary” and “change his or her title,” rather than strategies designed to elicit commitment, like “find out what challenges make her tick” and “provide opportunities for learning on the job.” Pittinsky and Shah sum up the point when they say, “This is a sad comment on contemporary workplace culture. The word “retain” makes workers sound like chattel. Who wants to be retained? Most employees seek to be valued, they want to be engaged.”

I agree with Melissa that EverFile provides only a part of the solution to this complex issue. But it is a step in the right direction, with EverFile’s focus on enabling the knowledge worker to articulate and convey her/his professional CONTRIBUTION VALUE to the employing organization. EverFile provides a potential springboard to a dialogue between the knowledge worker and the organization regarding the ways in which the organization can utilize and develop the worker’s professional expertise.

[Maria Tseng]

I am not an academic. I have worked as a wage slave for too long to admit, also as a free-agent a.k.a. independent consultant.

Back in the European Middle Ages, there were a class of entrepreneurs called journeymen. They were craftsmen and other skilled workers who were paid for their delverables. They went from town to town offering their services and products. They banded together into guilds with hallmarks, etc., sort of like labor unions.

But in the 1950, whoever it was wrote "The Organization Man." If I remember b-school HR classes rightly, 'modern knowledge workers' like us bemoaned how the Organization Man made the Faustian bargain of trading loyalty to the employer for long-term (not life-long in the US) employment. Amazon.com tells me that there's a 2002 edition of The Organization Man which might have a different analysis of how wage slaves subordinate their personal goals and aspirations to those of the organization.

In the 1980s came the rise of regular layoffs ('right sizing') and high population mobility that forced the advent of 5 different jobs through one career is 'normal' -- all the way to today's Silicon Valley culture where if you worked at the same company (not necessarily the same function in that company) for more than 2 years, you're out of touch and out of date and not a risk taker.

A parallel development from the Middle Ages until now is the Professional. We owe our allegience to a profession, not to a job nor an organization. We may belong to professional organizations, but we are first professionals and only secondarily a member of an organization such as an employer.

I believe it's past time for knowledge workers to recognize that we are modern-day journeymen -- valued for what we can offer at each transaction, that our loyalties are rightly first to ourselves, to our personal ability, integrity, repuation and brand as professionals, then to our client of the moment.

Everfile helps us organize our deliverables, our various brands, and to capture examples of our work.

I have several related brands. I am a business professional whose value-add is business modeling. Associated with that is the brand of being able to tailor and apply those models to my clients' needs. In journeymen terms, I might be a musician as was Mozart or Bach. Depending on our clients' ('patrons') needs and preferences, we apply our knowledge, skills and experience to deliver what our clients want. A funeral march? You got it. Dance music? Fine. A concerto or opera to show off your musician's bravura technique, no problem.

How do any of these brands and sub-brands detract from, or conflict with whatever loyalty profesional knowledge workers might lend to an organization, be it an employer, a church, a group of friends, an advisory board, etc...??? Where's the conflict, the 'selfishness???' Did I miss an important point?

[Melissa J. Jones]

A tough question one might ask: what do organizations and individuals owe each other?

On the one hand, I can see why organizations have had to struggle to meet the demands of workers (particularly in high technology) who expect high salaries and benefits and find it easy to move between companies in search of higher salaries or job titles.

On the other hand, I can appreciate why workers are frustrated when they see highly paid managers and executives making poor decisions without consequence -- decisions that ultimately can cost many employees their jobs.

If, as Jerry points out, both workers and organizations (both sides of the equation) need to show a commitment to building a collective "we," then they are going to have to share information. Organizations need the best people possible to accomplish their goals. Workers need the best environment possible to accomplish their tasks.

EverFile is only a small piece of the overall equation, but it is a tool that can help workers think about and best present their Contribution Value in ways that help organizations select the best skills and talents available.

[Jerry Krause]

This discussion relates to an email conversation that started a few days ago between me and EverFile advisory board member Maria Tseng, about “personal branding.” The many turning points in the work lives of knowledge nomads qualify as what Robert J. Havighurst termed “teachable moments,” that is, periods of openness to new guiding strategies. A new guiding strategy that emerged in 1990s was labeled and championed in an article by Tom Peters in the magazine “Fast Company” (August 1997), titled, “The Brand Called You,” and subsequently, in a book by Peters, titled “The Brand You 50” (1999). As described by Peters, the strategy involves following the lead of the corporate world: creating your own personal brand, through personal Internet websites, logos, handles, etc. (he presents fifty strategies all together). Peters says you should see yourself as the CEO of your own personal service company: Me, Incorporated. He says that each of us is “a free agent in an economy of free agents” and that you must establish our own “micro equivalent of the Nike swoosh” in order to create a unique difference between you and your competition.

A critique of Peters’ “The Brand Called You” strategy I think worth considering was offered in an article by Art Kleiner in the magazine “Strategy+Business” (Issue 23), “Strike Up the Brand.” Kleiner summed up his point as follows: “Tom Peters galvanized a free-agent nation with his manifesto, ‘The Brand Called You.’ But there is something missing from his vision: us.” He says that Peters’ strategy is one of obsessive, and shameless, self-promotion that will ultimately fail, because “the more the Web entices new free agents to market themselves, the more competition they will all face from each other. Those who dominate their niches early will thrive. For everybody else, the Brand Called You will be a ticket to obscurity.” The ultimate flaw in this strategy that I think is worth considering is that the formula undermines commitment and social responsibility to others, both in the work organization and in the wider society. What we really need to cultivate, says Kleiner, is a strategy that will allow the knowledge nomads to balance loyalty to themselves with loyalty to the organizations they choose to be part of. This strategy would be one in which people cultivate “a brand called we.”

I think it’s likely that creation of such a collective “we” identification between mobile workers and their work organizations will involve strategies that are initiated on both the “organization side” and the “worker side” of the management—worker equation. The Pittinsky-Shih article cited by Melissa Jones, EverFile’s CEO, gives some hints as to some of the strategies on the “organization side.” Among these strategies is creating jobs in which workers’ commitment to their careers are aligned with their commitment to the organization. It further seems to me that a tool like EverFile, which enables and encourages mobile workers to envision and present themselves as fitting into the organization’s mission, vision, and values is an example on the “worker side” of a strategy promoting that collective “we” identification.