A great YouTube clip adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates knowledge workers.
I found this at Miramar Mike's site posted as Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.

You'll find good backgrounders on knowledge management all over the web. Most assume the reader works in a large, or at least medium-sized company with plenty of resources.

On the other hand, Michela Ledwidge's excellent Knowledge management 101 published by the Australian Nett magazine provides an overview for smaller businesses and entrepreneurs.

As Lewidge says;

Knowledge management is one of those terms you have probably heard but dismissed as something only big companies do.

She then goes on to explain why you should at least think about knowledge management and how you can get started.

I only read it 30 minutes ago and I'm already exploring Zoho CRM and looking up other tools.

Connie Moore thinks the now out-of-business Circuit City is not so much a victim of the credit crunch as bad management.

In 2007, the company was feeling financial stress and laid-off 3,400 employees.

But not just any employees. The company deliberately got rid of its highest paid workers and replaced them with lower paid employees. Those higher paid workers were invited to apply for their old jobs at the new, lower, wages.

No doubt the witless morons playing with Excel spreadsheets calculated this would mean greater savings. It probably did. They should have looked at the bigger picture.

Those higher paid workers were experienced sales people. As Moore writes, they interacted daily with customers. They knew how things worked. They knew how to make the business work. Their incoming replacements didn't.

Moore argues, admittedly without any deep analysis, this was probably the root cause of the company's downfall.

I don't have access to the facts and I've never previously heard of Circuit City. Yet her reasoning sounds plausible. Circuit City wouldn't have been the first company to, metaphorically cut out its brain and then wonder why everything else failed to work.

While those sacked workers may have been at relatively low-level compared with the masters-of-the-universe strolling through the deep pile in the executive suite, they held the real knowledge about how the business worked on a day-to-day basis. Sacking knowledge workers, even if they are just humble shop clerks, means dumbing down the business. That's not a viable long-term strategy.

The Forrester Blog For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals.