Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom

For as long as anyone can remember leaders have been struggling to describe and to manage a mysterious kind of knowledge that people cannot readily pass on to others. It has been called wisdom, tribal knowledge, and tacit knowledge. Authors Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap put this elusive kind of expertise in an organizational context and call it deep smarts. One of the best ways to describe deep smarts is to provide an example of what it can do. They write, "When knowledge is fragmented, it takes deep smarts to aggregate it, make sense of it, see the relevant patterns, and act on it." So deep smarts is what it takes to define a path through confusion by sensing the connections in a blizzard of information. Wouldn't we all like to have that ability and have it flourish in our organizations? Deep Smarts, the book, stands out among its peers in the rapidly growing field of knowledge management books on the strength of several virtues that are expressed in the subtitle. The authors show the reader how to cultivate and transfer enduring business wisdom, with `how to' being one of the key elements. Cultivating deep smarts in an organization requires serious commitment from a manager. The manager must study it enough to understand its nature. It also requires a big investment in other people in order to give them the opportunity to develop deep smarts, which is to say, to move beyond ordinary levels of competence. Finally, the manager must maintain an environment that supports learning rather than stifling it. This means maintaining an environment of candor, fairness, and mutual respect. Anything less stifles learning and discourages the development of deep smarts. Swap and Leonard provide an abundance of rather specific guidance on the `how' component. They do not leave the reader to invent the implementation process. The tasks they prescribe are not easy, however, and this is why the skillful development of deep smarts is rarely accomplished by organizations. There are plenty of books on knowledge management, but Deep Smarts fills a unique niche for the working manager who faces the real life challenge of building a smarter organization by virtue of providing a helpful vocabulary, a useful conceptual framework, and real life examples of success and failure in knowledge management. This is a "best-of-class" book for both the scholar and the practitioner who is accountable for the bottom line.

By far the most useful and insightful book I've read in years. It changed the way I think about my organization and my career. Leonard and Swap have shown that deep smarts, the experienced-based knowledge held by individuals in a firm are vital to an organization's survival as well as to an individual's success. I've heard much about the necessity of "cultivating talent" or "managing knowledge" without any real insight into what constitutes talent or what kind of knowledge is important. The result I've seen has been impractical (but often very expensive) efforts to codify any available organizational information without any sense of how valuable or accessible it is. Leonard and Swap dig deeper into the real meaning of knowledge. Their research has identified what kind of knowledge creates competitive advantage, and more importantly, how leaders can cultivate and retain this knowledge. I don't know anyone in business who has not been confronted with the realization that vital experience has not been captured or passed on...when someone retires, leaves a position or leaves the company. And most of us have experienced a competitive threat based on superior expertise. But the solutions proposed usually aren't based on an understanding of how people actually learn (rather than how we wish they would) and don't often result in the development of judgment and wisdom. This book gave me a whole new way of thinking about expertise and how to leverage it. Deep Smarts also spoke to me on a personal level. I found their suggestions for how to build personal deep smarts an extremely useful approach to my own career development. I also appreciate that this book is grounded in rigorous research. Based on hundreds of interviews, it provides the kind of insight that comes from real people, managing real organizations. It is no wonder their suggestions and guidance are so actionable. For once, I feel like a management book has been written for managers! This book is a must for anyone serious about the reality of managing knowledge assets and intellectual capital.

If you're interested in how people gain expertise, and how they can communicate it to others, read "Deep Smarts." Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap provide much insight into the value of "deep smarts," -- "a special form of experience-based expertise ... critical for managers to understand and appreciate." Leonard and Swap describe methods companies and individuals can use to cultivate and share the most useful kind of expertise. They understand the complexities of sharing knowledge that's based on experience -- you can't really know some things until you do them. But you can get better faster at doing those things if (as Leonard and Swap show) you have experienced mentors who provide guidance and share expertise.

For my money, Deep Smarts is an absolutely brilliant book! I can't thank the writers enough, and I've been a "personal coach" for more than forty years--long before the idiom "personal coach" existed. I am especially grateful for bits and pieces of research of which I was unaware.

Leonard and Swap have written another great book. I gave their first book, When Sparks Fly, to countless frustrated managers with whom I've worked and have already told several VCs and, oddly enough, national security mavens, about this book. For those familiar with Leonard and Swaps's work, you will not be surprised by the useful insights they provide that are not written about elsewhere. Their basic premise is that not all employees contribute equally to the success of a business unit or company. Some employees have an uncanny ability to identify profitable market segments before the competition, correct failed design plans before problems occur, or assemble a team quickly to solve difficult problems. They can't run the entire business by themselves, but their knowledge helps to keep their businesses in tact. Unfortunately, managers often value these experts by their absence. When those with critical expertise leave the company, the void may not filled in time to stave off partial or complete collapse of a business unit or entire corporation. Those with deep smarts can be vitally important to a collective endeavor, and when they're gone the trouble just doesn't stop. Harvard Business School emerita professor Dorothy Leonard along with Walter Swap, the former dean of Tufts and a professor of psychology, explored the world of "knowledge stars" by interviewing people at 35 companies in the U.S., Hong Kong, Singapore, India, and China from 2000-2002. Their interviews reflect the humanity of those involved in building businesses: the star talent, the aging egos, insecurities, cultural differences, social beliefs, and deeply useful skill sets embedded in those who are truly expert. These people include superstars, such as venture capitalist Vinod Kholsa who helped found Juniper Networks, to managers of projects with mixed success rates, such as the Mars Pathfinder missions, and those now anonymous entrepreneurs of defunct Internet companies. The authors dig deep into the structure of these companies to pinpoint how things went right, and where they took a turn for the worse. The authors defined "deep smarts" as accumulated knowledge, know-how, and intuition gained from extensive experience. Deep smarts are more than competence, but "the ability to comprehend complex, interactive relationships and make swift, expert decisions based on that system level of comprehension but also the ability, when necessary, to dive into the component parts of that system and understand the details." These individuals have capabilities that those with less expertise do not have, allowing them to interpret small variations in data that elude novices, make decisions quickly, or know when they are encountering a rare event and evaluate its possible outcomes quickly. This level of expertise often requires ten years to develop and they get results that novices and those who are merely expert cannot. Because the study took place at the end of the Internet