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morning of October 1, 1996, the president was giving the speech to the annual meeting of the governors of the World Bank, a huge public occasion—more than 170 finance ministers and all their entourages—explaining the new strategy of becoming a knowledge-sharing organization. We were going to become “the knowledge bank.” It’s an understatement to say I was elated. In just a few days, the idea of knowledge sharing had gone from something undiscussable to something that was a central organizational strategy for the future. Visions of success and accomplishment danced before my eyes. The possibility of implementing the new strategy was now within my grasp. What I didn’t realize was that winning the support of the president wasn’t the end of the war of innovation. It was simply the beginning.

It was not just that we were starting the long, hard slog of turning the vision of a knowledge organization into a reality. The biggest shock was my discovery that the opposition from the managing directors didn’t disappear with the president’s endorsement. On the contrary, it intensified.

Obviously the support of the president was a hugely positive element. Jim Wolfensohn was mercurial, quick, able to see the promise in a bold new idea and decisive about endorsing it. His instant acceptance of knowledge sharing, his announcement of “the knowledge bank” at the annual meeting in 1996, his subsequent sponsorship of a formal strategy paper embracing external knowledge sharing in 1997, his adoption in 1999 of a formal mission statement for the World Bank that assigned knowledge sharing the same level of importance as providing financial resources—these were all crucial steps in launching and implementing knowledge management at the World Bank. Without them, we could never have achieved what was achieved. The managing directors were a very different story.

Up to that point, they’d permitted me to wander the corridors and buttonhole anyone who would listen to the idea of becoming a knowledge-sharing organization, because the possibility of that fantastic dream ever becoming a reality was nonexistent. They believed that I would tire of my quixotic mission and either find something more conventional to do or leave. They thought that their adversary was a person, albeit a determined one.
They hadn’t grasped that they were fighting an idea. Now, with the president having unexpectedly endorsed the idea in the most public, formal forum available to him, it was obvious that they had underestimated the threat. Even if they couldn’t see that the idea made sense or believe that it would ever become a reality, they now had to deal with the fact that the president had made a major commitment in the most public way to implement it.

Now they couldn’t oppose the idea outright, but as wily bureaucrats, they could and did find subtle ways to undermine or sideline it.4 Four years later, by 2000, despite the well-intended efforts of the managing directors to preserve the World Bank as a lending organization, substantial progress had been made. Knowledge sharing was in the mission statement of the organization, on a par with the provision of financial resources. It was in the organizational chart. It was in the personnel system. It was in the budget, albeit still underfunded in terms of real resources. And over a hundred knowledge commu本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。