Assumption number one: We are in the economy of attention

Workers live today in an environment where attention is a scarce resource. The problem is not anymore to have information available, but to decide how to effectively use their attention. I believe Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize in Economics 1978, was the first to say "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information."

Some directors still represent their problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity. Herbert Simon also said "and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information."

Directors who understand this, change their perspective and the way they understand knowledge management. They start thinking about personal knowledge management. They start asking for tools and habits that help each individual do his or her work in the most productive manner, wasting the least possible time in finding knowledge and creating the maximum impact out of his or her knowledge work. I will introduce syndication in a different post.

In other terms, maximizing the outcome of his or her most scarce resource: the attention.