How to Tie Everyday Work to Strategy

Abstract

The paper describes how Harvard Business School's Knowledge and Library Services (KLS) leveraged collective knowledge of its employees in formulating, implementing, and evaluating strategy. The organization was faced with major, disruptive changes in its environment and needed the diverse knowledge and a full engagement of all employees to make a series of strategic shifts. The shifts included integrating KLS products and services with the Harvard Business School research and course development process, developing global scope in information resources and expertise, and trading its role as the guardian of books and buildings for the organizer of the School's priority information assets. In order to achieve that, KLS launched the Environmental Scan Program relying on employees' insights aggregated through social tagging, trend analysis and internal prediction markets tracking emerging trends. KLS also created processes for collective assessment of strategy and a faster way of turning ideas into new products and services. The paper concludes with the assessment of the approach, pointing to a difficult balance between emergent and collective dimensions of strategy process with its formal, structured facets.