People say, 'GM is too big,' but the Navy does it. The difference, he says, is that GM can't match the wide and deep organizational commitment to knowledge management that exists in the Navy, particularly at senior levels. Prusak praises the Navy's emphasis on contextual thinking and case histories. Context is not words, and it's not numbers. One of the failings of expert systems is they don't capture context, just rules.
People spend more time learning than in any civilian organization.
And the way the military learns best, Strassmann says, isn't through classroom instruction but from exercises, or war games. But it could and should, Strassmann asserts. He says he once set up and refereed a war game at a Fortune 500 company. Middle management, which was trying to defend its budget request and operating plan, represented the company as the Blue Team, while senior management played the role of the company's key competitor as the Red Team. Through the game, management came to understand the competitor as never before, and it changed its operating plan accordingly.