CHAPTER 5
Driving for Success
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
—Herb Simon, 1971, American psychologist1
INTERNAL MARKETING: THE MYTH OF BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME
Any organization that wants to create awareness of its products will turn to marketing strategies to get attention from its customers. Sometimes the same organization will even talk about internal customers for certain types of endeavors. But when it comes to internal marketing, the position often seems to be: “Well, we just order things to happen!” Those having to drive internal initiatives forward often wonder why they have to go through bells and whistles to convince their own staff, get their attention, and carefully nudge them into certain behaviors.
In the past, you might have been able to order that some processes be followed, but with the complexity of today’s organizations, the many choices that knowledge workers have to focus and spend their energy on getting people to really change by just ordering them to is not as common. So you will have to apply similar strategies for your internal markets than you do for your external ones. The key message is: Do not be shy about internal marketing.
This is especially true with a knowledge flow management initiative. You are trying to engage people and want them to share something—their knowledge—that they might consider their most valuable asset. How can you use marketing techniques to make that happen?
There are a number of lessons we learned over the years that clearly show what marketing principles might work in this scenario.
Giving your initiative a clear brand is important. When we started out with ToolPool, we actually had an internal designer create a logo. The result was the word in a wave style, both words connected and letters T and P capitalized. We still use that logo in presentations, on internal Web sites, and for a pin that we gave out to contributors.
The ToolPool pin was an idea that came out of one of our team meetings. We were thinking about ways to reward contributors for their effort; the decision was to produce a little pin that they could wear to indicate that they are ToolPool contributors. The pins are little wavy flags with “ToolPool Contributor” written on them.
To this day we are still sending those pins to all new contributors in the company. It comes with a certificate that thanks them for their efforts and for helping organizational success by sharing their knowledge for the benefit of others. That certificate has the ToolPool logo on it and is signed by the chief knowledge officer (who happens to be me at the moment).
Contributors only receive one pin, and that is for their first contribution. It is more about becoming part of a club than getting payment for what they did. The effect of the pin differs. Some have sent thank-you e-mails after receiving them. In a couple of cases where a pin needle broke during shipment, people have asked for a replacement. Some people put them up on their boards in the office. Some probably ignored them and even threw them away. But most staff members are aware that you cannot get one without contributing. Out of the about 1,600 pins that we have given away so far, only two were given away without a ToolPool contribution. Those two pins went to the two major executives who supported ToolPool early on. They received pins as a sign of appreciation for sticking with us through the bootstrap phase.
In some offices, we send batches of pins to a manager of a group of contributors and have the manager distribute the pins during an event.
To be honest, at the beginning, we thought of the pins as just a little sign of appreciation, and to a number of people, that is probably all they are. But one story showed us how different cultures react differently and how the pins might mean much more for at least a certain portion of our contributors.
As there were a number of contributors in our office in Pune, India, we made up a package to send to the manager of the consulting team with certificates and pins. Unfortunately, the Indian tax authorities had an issue with our package, and it got stuck in customs for a couple of weeks. As we had announced the shipment to the Indian manager, he was expecting them and sent us a pretty demanding message asking “Where are our badges?”
The word badges really surprised me. I was amazed at how important those pins had become to at least some of our current and potential contributors.
The cost of this activity is actually quite low, only pennies per pin, and as we usually send them via interoffice mail, even the shipping costs are minimal. The effect has been astonishing. It has helped to build the internal brand and was another tool in the portfolio to raise awareness of ToolPool. And it has given a small but personal moment of appreciation to more than a thousand contributors around the globe.
An activity like this will not reach all of those targeted; even if it reaches and encourages only a certain portion of the target, it is worth it, as it helps drive the momentum. Even external marketing campaigns only reach portions of their targets audience.
Apart from the ToolPool pins, there are some other marketing activities that we use repeatedly. One is the celebration of milestones. For this type of marketing activity, it is important to have good statistics about your initiative. In the ToolPool case, two very simple statistics are usage and contribution numbers. We have daily reports on those, and because we can anticipate certain milestones, we are able to prepare events beforehand. Typical marks that we celebrated are:
Tools: 500, 1,000, 2,000
Downloads: 10,000, 25,000, 10,0000 … 500,000 (We just passed the 700,000th download!)
We also celebrate yearly ToolPool birthdays with special activities. For the tenth anniversary, we were able to get SAS president and chief executive officer Jim Goodnight to contribute a SAS program that he had personally written.
We use those occasions to give away some prizes and create global internal news articles appearing on our intranet homepage. In some cases, we even organized local celebrations.
When these marketing events happen, we usually open up new audiences for participation. At one of those occasions, we actually were contacted by the SAS patent department for the first time. It wanted to collaborate with the ToolPool team to identify patent candidates in ToolPool.
Even though turnover at SAS is very low (below 5 percent), there is some turnover and growth, of course. The marketing activities are also a great way to get extra visibility with those newcomers. Often people get informed about ToolPool either as part of the official induction or as part of the set of standard resources that new technical people are introduced to by colleagues or managers.
Apart from the special events, we also spend a considerable amount of effort on marketing to specific communities within the company. For example, we subscribe to the major technical news-groups or mailing lists and scan them for contribution candidates. For example, say a consultant asks a question or requests a certain functionality outside of the scope of the current product. Often another consultant has a solution and sends it or a tool as a reply to the mailing list. In the early phase of ToolPool, we would go in and work with the author to turn the reply into a contribution. The author in that case would hardly have to do anything. We then posted back the new location in ToolPool to everybody. While people might not remember the exact link, more and more they became aware that ToolPool was where to look for this and other tools. It frees them from scanning old unstructured mailing list archives, something that is not usually very effective. Having documentation and describing parameters adds value and makes tools much easier to find.
You could tell that the community had accepted the new place to locate tools and authors when people were pointing to specific ToolPool entries without stating what and where it is, and no one asked what and where ToolPool was. At this point, the team and I were convinced we had created a real winner.
Another way to hit the major communities was at technical workshops or international training events. We usually reserved short spots on the agenda, where one of our team members would introduce ToolPool and other relevant initiatives, inviting people to contribute. In some cases this was very fitting as people presented some of their recent tools during the workgroup. Offering the technical community a known and well-supported place for those entities fulfilled an immediate need since people wanted to get easy access to anything shared during the event.
Another way to market your initiative even in a large organization is through personal efforts, as the next story shows.
One Sunday afternoon I was browsing our internal web and found a page where somebody had listed a number of mailing lists. Each list had a link next to its name. I tried one of them, expecting to get an archive of e-mails posted to that list. But instead it was actually a link that opened my e-mail program and created an empty e-mail. I did not intend to post to the list, so I wanted to kill the window. Not fully concentrating, I accidentally hit the Send button. Oh no, I had just sent an empty e-mail without any subject to all the global members of that mailing list. While I was playing with ideas on how to save the situation, the first reply already came in. One of the subscribers replied with a question: “What is this e-mail trying to tell us?” I looked at my options:
• Ignore the whole thing and just move on—but it almost looked as if it was too late to ignore.
• Recall the e-mail, which usually does not work very well, and often makes sure that people will try to read it. When somebody recalls an e-mail, it just urges me to find out what the reason might be, and there is often a way to still read it.
• Reply with the typical widely hated response of sending another useless e-mail apologizing for the mistake.
None of these seemed particularly smart. So I tried something new:
I did reply, but the reply e-mail started with:
While I have your attention now, let me introduce you to the following Knowledge Management Initiatives that you might or might not be familiar with.
The rest of that e-mail very quickly introduced and pointed to two of our major initiatives that the audience could get value from. (I was fairly confident of this because I knew their topic and focus.) There was not a single additional funny reply, but from system stats, I could see that it produced a number of click-throughs to the initiative support systems.
Of course this will only work once, but it did work that Sunday afternoon. The moral of the story is: As a driver, you should always consider ways to market and build your initiative brand. In this case, I was actually able to turn an error into an opportunity.
The key factor of marketing activities is that they produce regular attention. One of the mistakes I have witnessed is a big-bang marketing launch of an initiative not followed with an ongoing, longstanding follow-up. I wonder how many portals in the world have been launched with high hopes, great messages, and all the senior management support, and then the expectation was that everybody paid attention and, based on that launch message, happily shared their knowledge ever after. But only when they see ongoing value over time will people really put in the effort that is needed. So a lot of those highly acclaimed systems went down shortly after the smoke had cleared because the team launching it was moving on to the next “project.”
It is also important for your marketing message to appeal to the issues that people face. Often the marketing of initiatives tries to appeal to their global value. And in the end, the global value will provide the highest value. But that does not have to be the message that you are leading with. You can equally appeal to local value and global value will be the by-product. In the case of ToolPool, one country had initiated a local effort for sharing tools. It even appointed a “tools manager.” This was a position where people would take turns managing a local collection of tools. The country had several separate offices, and recognized that just between different locations, people sometimes were not aware of those tools that others had created. As a result, there was reinventing even at that level. But it turned out that they had some challenges sustaining the effort. The round-robin of the tools manager did not really work. In the end, one person did the job for a while, finding it harder and harder to concentrate on this nonprofit extra task.
We marketed ToolPool to that team by saying:
• We provide you with the support end to end.
• We provide a stable infrastructure.
• What you will have to do is provide those tools according to a set of standards (i.e., basic documentation in English).
That was how we channeled their efforts into the global community. The English documentation was actually a little bit of a hurdle, but the value of not having to invest in local resources and still be able to share within that local organization was considered high enough for management to switch and endorse this way of operation. Even looking at it only from their local country perspective, they saw the value they got out of it. In the end, the global initiative was the real winner, with some of the tools that those local consultants provided becoming huge successes in many other countries.
Another tip on how to market your initiatives, at least in the early phase, is to make it hard and easy at the same time. Take, for example, the case of announcing a certain initiative or a system within it as a reply to a posted question on a mailing list. Of course, you want to make it easy to get an answer on a question people might have. But sometimes it is smarter to make it just a little bit harder. Instead of sending out a link to the final content, you could link to the system with very simple instructions to get to the content. Something like: “There is an excellent tool in ToolPool that will do exactly what you need. Go to ToolPool (LINK) and search with keywords KEY1 and KEY2.”
You would not send the answer directly to the person who asked but answer to the list. The reason for this is that others might have had the same problem, or they might at least have started to think about a solution. If you give a link to the final answer, people will download that piece of content and be happy for the moment. That might be the way to go, if you succeeded already in making the initiative widely known. But if you are still in the bootstrap phase, making it a little harder will give a lot of people the experience of what success in using it will look like. They will have seen it, searched, and found something; you will have gone the extra step of building your brand. And over time, people will know how to feed themselves and actually use the initiative system right away, and leave the list to the most important questions or those that are not covered yet.
It is also important to stay consistent in the way you lead users to your initiative. It is an internal brand. Once you are successful, other areas of your organization will be pointing to the initiative (or parts of it). Make sure they do so in a consistent, brand-building manner, and not with everyone coming up with their own ways to refer and point to the initiative. It is pure (internal) brand building, and I am sure there are other marketing methods you can apply. Talk to your marketing experts.
In the story about the mailing list blooper, one of the key factors was attention. Especially in times when people have many heavily loaded channels to choose from and are bombarded with information and requests, it is important to get their attention. Tom Davenport and John Beck covered the importance of attention in their book The Attention Economy.2 The fact is that without getting some attention first, it will be hard to get action. Of course, you will be competing with other initiatives trying to get people’s attention.
Some of the major ways of getting the needed attention include:
• Use existing channels. By using existing channels, it is easier to reach people where they are looking. It is also easier to ensure that your initiative gets integrated into existing business processes. The downside is that those channels can be fairly loaded already and competition for attention is high.
• Create additional, new channels. Sometimes to get wide attention, especially if you want to leave it more open as to what audiences you are drawing into your initiative, you might want to try a totally new channel or slightly modify a traditional channel. If it is unusual enough, it can draw people in, especially those interested in new things. A good example would be the juggling presentations mentioned in an earlier chapter. The channel—a juggling performance—is unusual. And as it was part of an event that the key players attended for other reasons, it opened up the opportunity for getting attention. A standard slide presentation could not have created the level of attention needed to really drive a few key messages home. The key is to be innovative. Another great example of getting attention in an unusual way is sign spinners. This supposedly started out in California a few years ago, where a few of those tasked with holding up advertising signs at street corners got bored and started flipping them around. Nowadays some have really perfected the flipping and have become street artists who perform sophisticated routines with the signs. The spinning is just the extra touch that makes it appealing to otherwise bored drivers and grabs their attention. So maybe your initiative needs some sign spinners in the organization.
It is very important to understand that individual events that create some attention will not create lasting success. Failure to recognize this is a key mistake. It does not matter how smart your marketing activity might be; if it is a one-off, it will not provide lasting success. It needs repetition for as long as you want your initiative to be successful. It needs a pulse.
THE PULSE
A topic that is related to marketing is what I refer to as “creating a pulse.” If you look at your initiative as a living entity, the pulse is what keeps it alive. It is not enough to blow huge amounts of blood into it at the start. Only the existence of a pulse makes it survive. Elements that can help create a pulse are regular events and news items.
One key pulse element that we added almost from the start of our initiative was a weekly e-mail to a list of subscribers. This list was by subscription only. We did not force anybody to subscribe. Nevertheless, today there are about 1,600 subscribers. An e-mail goes out every Sunday and is read by most subscribers on Monday.
To make writing this e-mail really easy, it is partly automatically produced, but to give it a personal touch, it also contains a manual element. With the help of a simple Web interface, a ToolPool administrator adds a short block of text that shows up at the top of the e-mail. There is a template text that the administrator can start from. The text usually has interesting tips, recent news on ToolPool, or highlights specific contributions or achievements. It might point to the first Brazilian contribution or talk about the system being down for three hours next weekend. It might announce one of the milestones or ask for specific feedback or help with an entry. The key is that it is specific to that week; people can see that a human has produced it and is personally turning to them.
The rest of the e-mail is the automatic part and is a manageable, professional-looking list of new entries with direct links to documentation and downloads, information about the author, the contributing office, and more. It also contains ways to get to a discussion list, the main application page, and how to reach the administrators. As there are somewhere between 8 to 15 new ToolPool entries in an average week, the e-mail is not long. Early on, some people asked if we could introduce some subsetting, and we played with that idea. But it turned out to be overkill. One of the side effects of showing everybody the full list is unanticipated learning as people get to see not only what they think is relevant for them. They might be triggered by keywords to look at details of tools they might have otherwise filtered out. The result is sometimes an interesting cross-fertilization and innovation.
A number of our subscribers, especially some of the consulting and development managers, have told me that the ToolPool e-mail is the e-mail that they definitely read on Monday morning. And in the rare cases when technical problems delayed the e-mail, several people asked what might be wrong.
E-mail is only one way to create a pulse. Other methods we have used were short regular Web presentations highlighting certain content or features. And recently links to the weekly e-mails (which are stored in an easily Web-accessible archive) are being posted on our SAS internal Twitter stream to reach additional audiences.
I believe a pulse is something that every knowledge flow management initiative needs. And as you do not want to overdo it, it is important to have a smart ongoing campaign management that monitors how those activities are received and reacts on feedback instantly. How you create that pulse depends on the initiative. The key is regularity, a good fit to the needs of those you want to get involved, and the flexibility to adapt very quickly.
KEEP IT SIMPLE
Often there is an urge to create a system within an initiative that supports the current business process as exactly as possible. One danger of that approach is increasing complexity and inflexibility.
When I started an initiative for exchanging project experiences and gathered feedback on an early prototype of an application that I wanted to use, a few people wanted me to add very specific describing parameters as fields. But I had seen what happened to an earlier initiative of a reference tracking system. People were asked to provide a large number of parameters; as a result, many were left empty or filled inconsistently. The argument was: “Those are all important and people will have to know them.” But the reality was that contributors did not take the time to fill them in. The system’s data quality was really low as a result. It is very important to start simple and small. Once you have buy-in and believers in the value, you might be able to raise the bar and ask for additional information.
Another issue arises when you try to map a system perfectly to a current business process. Almost always this means underestimating the dynamics of those processes. In the best case, what you offer the users will fit the minute you launch it (and even that is unlikely). But what about three months from launch time: Will it still fit? If it does not, the acceptance rate will go down, and all the effort you put into the system might end in diminishing participation. Remember, you cannot make people go and share their knowledge. If you want to get a good return of investment, it is best to be considerate, leave enough freedom to adapt. Spend your efforts in driving the processes around a system and how you can enable people to use it instead of focusing on a perfect map for a snapshot in time.
This is another reason why nontechnical elements of a knowledge flow initiative are so important. They might actually be easier to adapt. You can change your processes to align with what people really do, but often it is harder to change a system that was designed to support a process on a very detailed level.
In using this simpler approach, you might have to fight the urge to follow just any requirement that comes up and also work very carefully at objection handling in the launch and roll-out phases. You will definitely have people who see simplicity as a deficiency. Those are the ones who need a lot of hand-holding. My advice is not to focus on requirements coming in through those types of people. Instead, focus on participants who are more comfortable with changing environments, the more experienced ones who will make it work. This should be the role model of future employees. I do not think you should set the bar based on those who are incapable of dealing with change.
For the future, you need those who not only have a lot of knowledge but are flexible enough to rebuild that base constantly. Having knowledge and relying on it as a status quo will become of less importance in a world where the shelf life of things people need to know is decreasing at incredible speed.
Keeping it simple not only means you are going to get your initiative quicker to market and it will be able to survive longer without being viewed as outdated and supporting old processes; it will also attract and support the right type of people in your organization.
As much as I am in favor of user acceptance, in some cases you might have to overrule requests for too much detail. It is a fine line sometimes, but getting this right is another key success factor.
GO GLOBAL: THE POWER OF SCALING
In the end, the focus of my initiatives has always been global. They might start out on a local level, but very soon I tried to get to global participation, because with the scale of reuse, the return on investment increases as well. This is a factor that is constantly underestimated by contributors and some stakeholders as well. The big value in sharing knowledge comes with scale.
Let us say you have an asset (in our example, it is a reusable piece of software—a tool). If someone creates something like that and reuses it himself, the reuse factor is maybe 3 or 4. Now, if he shares that tool with one of his colleagues, it might get up to 7 or 8; if he shares it with the majority of his department, it might get up to 12 to 15. But those numbers are dwarfed by a reuse in a global organization with 1,600 consultants in 60 countries. The level of reuse can easily get to 300 to 500.
At SAS, we have tools that got reused over a 1,000 times. To sit down to produce documentation for a tool might take one to two hours, even less in a lot of cases.
If a tool is now reused three or four times and you save maybe an hour per reuse, it might just be worth it. But at a reuse factor of 1,000, the invested two hours are nothing compared to the value it produces. And we are not even talking about standardizing approaches, cross learning, connection building, and all the rest of the benefits.
In a globalized organization (pretty much any big organization these days), it is important to focus on that global reuse element as it might provide high returns. What is also often underestimated, especially by contributors themselves, is the applicability of their knowledge. Most contributors think that their challenges are unique, but in a globalized world, this is often not true. A bank looking for a specific solution in Japan will not be so dramatically different from a bank looking for a solution in Spain. But we all like to think that what we have at hand is globally unique, and there is no way someone else might suffer a similar “bad” issue.
One good way of getting people beyond that thinking is transparency, as I discuss in Chapter 8 when it comes to presenting contributors with the right measures for their own analysis.
So my recommendation is to go for a simpler but global approach and not an overloaded and local one, if you need to focus your resources.
If you think about it, this is also the power behind the Internet hype. Why did all those Web 2.0 applications succeed? Because they went narrow (i.e., simple) and global, instead of going for a high feature set and staying on a local level.
This is what I call the power of scaling. Many business models on the net are based on the principle of providing a simple, cheap application that is built for a large audience. If you can motivate 1 million people to use a free version of an application, you might have enough fans to motivate 5 to 10 percent of those to go for a high-end version of it. They will actually pay for an advanced version or services around it. Even spam is based on that principle. Spammers do not have a big issue with the fact that 99.99 percent of their messages get killed by some spam filter. At 300 million messages, 0.01 percent of recipients stupid or desperate enough actually to buy something is still 30,000 customers.
MOTIVATION
Motivation is a tricky topic, and I will not go into a psychological discussion of what motivation is and how it works in general. Nevertheless, the question “How can I motivate my people to share their knowledge?” is probably one that everyone who trying to push a knowledge flow management initiative is asking.
It is hard to really motivate someone directly. It is more a matter of encouraging people to develop the kind of self-motivating factors that drives them individually.
The most successful approach is through a portfolio of methods to enable this self-motivation to develop. Any organization will have a range of people who are driven by different things. Some people are driven by acknowledgement. So add something into your portfolio that will make sure such people receive some type of recognition after sharing their knowledge with others. But not everyone will be positively influenced by such recognition. Some people might prefer a more quiet acknowledgment over 15 seconds of fame.
Some people are motivated by guidelines. A job description that says that they should be sharing their knowledge might actually influ-ence their behavior. In my experience, this is a small group. I would definitely not rely on this one working on a wider scale.
One of the first ideas I always hear mentioned is to give monetary rewards to “motivate” people. I have even heard statements like “Money is the only thing that will get people to contribute.”
This is not true. In one example where people were given monetary rewards for sharing success stories, the result was a brief, temporary flow of contributions. A lot were in a form that did not provide much value without extensive rework. Clearly people often were focused on the incentive and not on the contribution.
One other problem is that people get the message that they need to be paid for sharing their knowledge. So as soon as the incentive goes down or is taken away, the sharing behavior will be worse than before. For an ongoing good knowledge flow, you need that ongoing participation, and you get that only if people accept it as part of their normal job. Thus monetary rewards can have negative effects in the long run. You will get quantity but not quality (unless very closely monitored—a costly and sometimes demotivating exercise).
Just as with other drivers, the best approach is a portfolio approach (i.e., motivating different people with different incentives). To reach as many as possible and to extend chances that incentives work, a combination of embedded processes (i.e., linked to objectives), recognition, and asynchronous rewards have worked best. By asynchronous I mean rewards that happen on certain occasions in contrast to synchronous rewards (monetary, as in “I share then I get something”). A good example of the effect of asynchronous rewards are lotteries. Have you ever seen how people storm into the ticket agencies when there is an unusually high jackpot? Their chances of winning are not higher, and if they win (especially if it is in a category below the jackpot), they will have to split the prize many times, because everyone else entered the lottery. High jackpots seem to be especially motivating, though. Similarly, I have seen occasional more visible rewards to be more successful than small invisible regular ones.
Apart from looking at motivating factors, I would recommend looking at the demotivators and fight those as an additional strategy. Instead of trying to directly motivate people, this approach attempts to ensure that any potential barriers or demotivators are reduced to a minimum. Motivation is a big challenge for anyone running knowledge flow management initiatives. The solution lies more in trying to get the obstacles removed from the flow than trying to make people do things. You can encourage and find compelling reasons for people to participate. But often it is more about identifying the key barriers that keep people from sharing their knowledge and work on reducing those.
WHAT IF YOUR KNOWLEDGE TAKES A WALK?
As knowledge is connected to humans, it can also easily flow out of your organization when people leave. A range of activities have been tried to capture that knowledge, but most of them are insufficient. You cannot store knowledge in a database, even though that is often one of the hopes that people have. You can store a certain amount of information shared by someone who had the knowledge, but it will not have the same value as the knowledge itself. There are many dimensions to knowledge that will be lost with the person. Recording stories, videos, and more might be a way to pick up some of the additional dimensions. A lot of the knowledge can be in the network a person was part of. It needs the connections that the person had with a given community. That type of knowledge actually would not completely take a walk but just get lost to a large degree.
The best way to keep knowledge from leaving the organization is to embed it. If a person with a specific knowledge is involved regularly in internal communities and works closely with other community members, a certain amount of knowledge becomes common knowledge (shared by multiple members of the community). If in that case the team member leaves, a lot of the knowledge stays in the organization. 3 This would not help if a competitor hires a whole community or team away from you, but such group walks are not as frequent as individual leavers.
Embedding the knowledge, as a side effect, also makes it less easy to replicate. Knowledge represented not by one person, but by the collaboration of a community is much harder for a competitor to replicate, even if it would hire away one or two key individuals.
For completeness, it must be said that the case of an individual who leaves and takes a certain amount of knowledge along does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. The case of someone leaving might enable unlearning, whereby people question existing knowledge and open up chances for seeing things in a new light. The remaining community could start to innovate after some old-way-thinking moved on. Also, if a certain expert is too dominant and people are too dependent on that person, it could hinder emancipation of others. Last but not least, the person who leaves might be replaced by someone external who introduces new thinking and innovation potential into the organization.
In this chapter I looked at some of the driving forces and strategies you could apply to actively drive improvements for your knowledge flow. The next chapter looks at the reverse side: barriers and how to get improvements by reducing them.
NOTES
1 The full quote reads: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” Martin Greenberger, ed., Computers, Communications and the Public Interest (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), pp. 40-41.
2 Tom H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2002).
3 In project management, some people have been talking about a project bus number. This is the number of people who can get hit by a bus before the project is endangered. Others have transferred that concept to organizations; see: http://blog.tortus.com/2009/6/3/what-is-your-bus-number
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