“Managing Professional Intellect”
by James Brian Quinn, Philip Anderson and Sydney Finkelstein

From:  Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. 
Harvard Business School Press, 1998. pp. 181-205

Summarized by: Gen Medina
28 July 2001

 

  • In the post-industrial era, the success of a corporation lies more in its intellectual and systems capabilities than its physical assets.
  • Critical executive skill of the age: managing human intellect and converting it into useful products and services


What is Professional Intellect?

Four levels of professional intellect (in order of increasing importance):

1. Cognitive Knowledge
  • know-what
  • basic mastery of  a discipline that professionals achieve through extensive training and certification.
  • essential, but far from sufficient for commercial success
    • 2. Advanced Skills
  • know-how
  • ability to apply the rules of a discipline to complex real-world problems is the most widespread value creating professional skill level.
    • 3. Systems Understanding
  • know-why
  • deep knowledge of the web of cause-and-effect relationships underlying a principle
  • it permits professionals to move beyond the execution of tasks to solve larger and more complex problems – and to create extraordinary value
    • The first three can also exist in the organization’s systems, databases, or operating technologies.
    4. Self-motivated creativity
  • care-why
  • consists of will, motivation and adaptability for success
  • often found in the culture


    • Developing Professional Intellect

    Best Practices:

    1. Recruit the Best

  • the leverage of intellect is so great that topflight professionals can create a successful organization or make a lesser one flourish, e.g.
    •  Marvin Bower  –  McKinsey & Company
      Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore  –  Intel
      Bill Gates and Paul Allen  –  Microsoft
      Robert Swanson  –  Genentech
      Albert Einstein  –  Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study
    • leading management  consultants devote enormous resources to recruiting that they heavily screen the top graduates of leading business schools
    2. Force intensive early development
    • professional know-how is developed most rapidly through repeated exposure to the complexity of real problems
    • people who go through intensive experiences become more valuable and capable
    • the most successful organizations ensure such growth through constantly heightened complexity, thoroughly planned mentoring, substantial rewards for performance and strong incentives to understand, systematize and advance the discipline.
    3. Constantly increase professional challenges
    • leaders of the best organizations tend to be demanding, visionary and intolerant of half-hearted efforts. They often set impossible “stretch goals”
    • the best organizations constantly push their professionals beyond the comfort of their book knowledge, simulation models and controlled laboratories.
    4. Evaluate the weed
    • professionals like to be evaluated (objectively), to compete, to know they have excelled against their peers.
    • heavy internal competition and frequent performance appraisal and feedback are common in outstanding organizations.


    Leveraging Professional Intellect
     

    1. Boost professionals’ problem-solving abilities by capturing knowledge in systems and software e.g. Merrill Lynch

    2. Overcome professionals’ reluctance to share information

    • intellectual assets, unlike physical assets, increase in value with use.
    • properly stimulated, knowledge and intellect grow exponentially when shared.
    • e.g. Andersen Worldwide- ANet – electronic system linking 82,000 people operating in 360 offices in 76 countries
    3. Organize around intellect
    • with intellectual assets, individual professionals typically provide customized solutions to an endless stream of new problems


    Inverting Organizations

    • Many  successful enterprises organize themselves in patterns specifically tailored to the particular way their professional intellect creates value, e.g. Nova Care:
      • its critical professional intellect resides in its more than 5,000 occupational, speech and physical therapists
      • NovaNet, the company’s software system, captures and enhances much of the organization’s systems knowledge.
      • The leverage of Nova Care’s organizational structure is distributive, i.e. the support organization efficiently distributes logistics, analysis and administrative support to the professionals.
      • The former line hierarchy becomes a support structure, intervening only in extreme emergencies.
    • Inverted organizations pose some unique managerial challenges.
    • Important to have the systems or computer infrastructures to enable people to adapt to the new organization.
    • Senior managers should support the concept with thoroughly overhauled performance-measurement and reward systems.


    Creating Intellectual Webs

    • Spider’s Webs: self-organizing network that brings people together quickly to solve a particular problem and then disbands just as quickly once the job is done, e.g Merrill Lynch
    • For virtually all purposes, encouraging shared interests, common values, and mutually satisfying solutions is essential for leveraging knowledge in these structures.
    • Electronics allow many more highly diverse, geographically dispersed, intellectually specialized talents to be brought to bear on a single project than ever before.

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