Customer Reviews

Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom

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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 boom, it's particularly helpful in sorting out the complicated reasons the world was infatuated with novice entrepreneurs and what we needed to have been looking for all along to build or invest in lasting businesses. Specifically the authors found that when the capital markets froze, the novices had little to no expertise in managing in times of scarcity. They contributed to the downfall of what could have been good businesses. Those with deep smarts had lived through both ends of the capital market swings as well as in a middling market. They could manage through scarcity and still identify good opportunities­at least they had a better shot at it than the novice managers.

For those structuring businesses, identifying employees who could work in a myriad of economic scenarios turned out to be more important than thought. It remains a critical lesson of the Internet boom for those who now working with different cultures or with complicated futuristic technologies or in universities where top talent is expensive to recruit and choices have to be made carefully.

Deep Smarts is an important book to read for both the argument it makes ­deeply expert people matter­as well as for the practical advice embedded in the "Keep in Mind" lists at the end of each chapter. These lists help managers recall the key findings of the study, something you'd want to take stock of when planning for the next year or in evaluating an expensive hire. The chapter "Assembling deep smarts" lists tick off the choices involved establishing a trust of talents. A list at the end of the section about developing expertise there's a section about why experts fail­overconfidence, an inability to communicate, or even ignorance. (In new markets, there may not be an expert.) And a section on "Transferring deep smarts" helps you realize what is realistic and how to establish appropriate goals. Such lists help a manager quickly focus on identifying pockets of critical business wisdom and how to structure a fighting chance of transferring these valuable skills while there is still time to effect such a change.

Swap and Leonard have compiled an impressive set of work on creating, structuring, and sustaining sources of innovation in businesses. Both independently esteemed scholars, their last joint effort, When Sparks Fly is a terrific read about group creativity and its challenges. (Leonard's groundbreaking Wellsprings of Knowledge remains one of the best books around on establishing, sustaining, and protecting corporate innovation.) Deep Smarts is an essential and important contribution to business literature, because it adds their careful research, clear writing, and their own significant deep smarts to the vital topic of business talent and wisdom transfer.

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.

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.

A disappointing book from the authors of some extremely good ones. 'Deep smarts' are jargon for substantial depth of experientially based learning and reflection and the book is concerned with building and transferring this knowldge.
Apart from the irritation of the repetitive overuse of the jargon phrase `deep smarts' - like a sort of verbal battering-ram - the content does not add much to well-established principles for the transfer of experiential and largely tacit knowledge.
The conclusions are useful, but none of them will add much for anyone in the field of organization change or development.
But it is also certainly true that few organizations pay enough attention to this important source of success or failure.

This book is in the area of Knowledge Management. Similar to many other business books, it is based on empirical research performed by the authors.

The authors first define what they mean by "deep smarts" through reviewing different levels of expertise. Then they introduce the main thesis of the book. Expertise is acquired by an individual through active knowledge building. This includes getting first-hand experience and the transfer of knowledge from coaches or through other means. However, in such a process, the amount of knowledge that is actually internalized is also influenced by one's own beliefs and other people via their social influences.

The authors have led me to a significant understanding of why it is so hard for some people to learn, despite the fact that, their need for the relevant knowledge is very obvious already. Important factors include their lack of knowledge receptors and the knowledge to which they are exposed being contrary to their existing beliefs and assumptions.

This book is a great help to coaches, teachers, and consultants in helping them learn more effective methods of transferring knowledge to their students or clients in various situations.

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.

In Deep Smarts, the authors demonstrate a brilliant capacity for translating complex concepts into practical ideas for managers. Finally, here is book that addresses directly some of the challenges in knowledge transfer at a critical time for professions in all sectors of society. The authors tackle a very difficult problem: how to understand expertise; but then they go the additional step and discuss how to develop useful practices for sharing expertise across organizations. Leonard and Swap show how and why expertise can and should be captured before knowledge 'walks out the door.' The book aggregates and synthesizes years of primary and secondary academic research, but you wouldn't necessarily know that unless you took a close look at the extensive citations. In addition, there are many case examples that tell the story in a compelling and highly readable manner.

Some may see this as a book for HR, training&development, or knowledge management... it is for all three of these domains and the one that ties them together: strategy. As expertise is more greatly valued as the enduring resource for sustainable economic advantage, knowledge-based organizations will turn increasingly to their communities of practice, in which resides the expertise that is the wellspring of innovation.

This book uses great examples to explain the value of different levels of smarts. In the ancient hunting and gathering age, it's almost impossible for a hunter to get 1000 times of games more than his peer did. But in the Internet age, an expert programmer can easily make 1000 times of IT performance higher than her peer does.

The related critical issues come along: (1) How to distinguish different levels of knowledge? (2) How to find the right knowledge workers with required level of intelligence? (3) How to develop the deep smarts and their knowledge masters? (4) Finally, how to use those deep smarts to accomplish the organization's goals?

In the future editions, I would like to see the authors elaborate more on item (3) and (4) which are lightly exploited at the current version. Even for the item (1): how to distinguish different levels of knowledge? I think more quantitative and qualitative analysis may be introduced for better measurement and clarification. For example, how to measure the productivity of the software programmer is a tough task. (It's certainly not measured by the lines of code written per day.) In the senior corporate management and politics, it becomes extremely hard for rigorous performance measurement.

In a word, the deep smarts make good to great happen. The level 5 leaders in the greatest companies deploy and enable their organizations' deep smarts and constantly out-perform the rest. Therefore, it would be great worth exploring the general mechanism of deep smarts.