The Angels and Demons of Personal Knowledge Management

There’s an intriguing post up on Slaw right now (check it out here) by Joel Alleyne talking about the difference between personal knowledge management (”PKM“) and organizational knowledge management (”OKM“).  I’m a big fan of PKM because it frees you as an individual to radically improve your productivity, experiment, and pursue your passions, free from the shackles of organizational bureaucracy.

Perhaps one of the most valuable aspects of PKM is that, for the particular individual involved, you can quickly achieve an unqualified success.

OKM is often hijacked by politics within the organization, resulting in either: (a) a massive change management challenge where the lawyers actively resist or ignore OKM efforts, or (b) OKM that represents a compromise in quality due to “folk wisdom” input from powerful players in the organization (e.g., poorly written contract clauses reflecting an influential equity partner’s preferences, even if they’re rife with legalese and make negotiations more difficult).

None of these problems occur for an individual.  The individual, through the support of a KM expert, can quickly adopt a KM template covering the most common contracts the individual creates and negotiates (in fact, this was how WhichDraft.com’s great contracts were born, check them out here), can set up a simple organizational tree for all research, and can track metrics to document productivity gains (check out our new proposed 3 True Outcomes metric for lawyers here).

Best of all, this kind of PKM can provide the business case to successfully roll out OKM.

Use PKM – it’s elementary, my dear Watson.

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