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Here was a country with hardly an acceptable infrastructure in anything. (For example, water and electricity were rationed during the day.) It was a country still recovering from a cruel civil war, and bullet holes were still visible in building walls. It was a country located at the unstable intersection of Russia to the north, Iran and Turkey to the south, and Azerbaijan and Armenia to the east — all of which were jealously vigilant about oil and gas projects in the Caspian Sea. And in this volatile setting, there were businesspeople who were looking not only to sell but also to gather up ideas about potential computer services.
German, American, and British businessmen were there to connect with young professionals and students who had interesting technology ideas, an acute understanding of Eastern European markets, or a provocative perspective of IT potential. They were visiting with people who had ideas about system hurdles and application products. In other words, representatives of what we like to consider "thought leader" firms were not only there to pitch ideas or sniff out sales opportunities, but also engage in a little bit of "creative swiping."
It is a truism today that if we are living in a knowledge economy, then the most intelligent firm — all other factors being equal — is going to win. One way to be the most intelligent organization, of course, is to make sure you have the most intelligent employees; hence, the competition for talent. But everyone else is thinking this way today, too, or they will be in the near future. And that prospect leads executives to consider the idea of sharing intelligence and leveraging intellectual capital; hence, the explosion in knowledge management consultancies.
The Tbilisi experience is a strong reminder of a wider way to look at the pursuit of corporate intelligence. It says you need to search for knowledge everywhere. Yes, your proprietary database is invaluable. Yes, your industry data and trend monitoring promises strategic insights. Yes, building a skill bank is crucial. But just as important is the expansion of the accessible knowledge pool available for us to draw upon. In today's world, that knowledge pool includes information that can exist anywhere, anyplace.
Geographical boundaries, of course, have been falling as constraints on the exchange of ideas for some time. IBM's Swiss research facilities win international acclaim, and 3M's innovations in imaging technology derived from work in Argentina have also been recognized. A Finnish graduate student developed Linux, the popular open source software version of Unix. These are just a few of a thousand potential examples. But a laboratory in Switzerland, a development facility in Buenos Aires, or a university in Finland are not Tbilisi. And there we have the issue. The framework we use for generating innovation or prompts to creative efforts is probably more circumscribed than it ought to be. It is one thing for the Body Shop to hunt for lotions and oils in out-of-the-way locales, but it is something quite different in the world of ideas. This attitude is what we are challenging now.
Ultimately, the issue in a talent-centric world is about how to get your organization to learn faster than your competitors. In a word, the contest for intelligence and knowledge has gone democratic: Any piece of information has a given utility regardless of where it originates. Thus, leadership needs to pursue every source of potential advantage, regardless of former biases and preconceptions.
Nicholas Imparato is professor of marketing and management at the University of San Francisco's McLaren School of Business and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the editor of the new book Capital for Our Time: The Economic, Legal, and Management Challenges of Intellectual Capital (Hoover Institution Press, 1998). You can reach him at imparato@hoover.stanford.edu.
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