Morten T. Hansen

Bolko von Oetinger

<article-ideainbrief class="article-ideainbrief">
 <h4 class="ideainbrief-title">The Idea in Brief</h4>
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 The world’s most profitable oil company, BP Amoco, has over 100,000 employees and 50 separate business units operating in 100 countries. Surprisingly, its unit managers are equally committed to both their company’s overall success and their own units’ performance.
 How can your firm strike this delicate balance? By cultivating T-shaped managers—executives who share ideas and expertise across the company (the horizontal part of the “T”) while also focusing on their own unit performance (the vertical part of the “T”).
 This cross-unit collaboration pays huge dividends: You leverage vital resources scattered across your company and surmount key challenges—fending off rivals, integrating merged businesses, and driving continual innovation.
 The Idea in Practice
 <h2>How to Create Horizontal Value</h2>
 T-shaped managers create horizontal value—collaborating, connecting people, and exchanging advice with other business units—in five ways:
 Increase efficiency through transferring best practices. By replicating other BP pilot programs, retail-operations manager Deborah Copeland reduced working capital at several service stations by 20%—and boosted sales by 10%.
 Improve decision quality through peer advice. Anne Drinkwater had to decide the number and size of tankers her unit needed to handle oil production output—over the next 20 years. Peers from other units challenged her unit’s thinking and pointed them in the right direction.
 Grow revenue through shared expertise. After 75 people shared advice on a risky, $200 million joint venture in China, BP finished the project on time and under budget. The business broke even after just several months.
 Develop new opportunities through cross-pollination of ideas. A 15-business-unit brainstorming session generated 600 new e-business ideas, 150 of which BP is now developing. This effort tapped wellsprings of ideas and expertise—a large company’s greatest competitive advantage in the knowledge economy.
 Make bold strategic moves through well-coordinated implementation. After BP acquired Amoco, its freewheeling idea exchange and flexible peer-group behavior helped it implement the merger in just 90 days. Result? Confidence to launch another successful merger—with ARCO—only months later.
 <h2>How to Help T-Managers Flourish</h2>
 To cultivate an environment where T-shaped managers can thrive, promote and discipline horizontal management behavior—without creating ossifying structures. Here’s how:
 Create clear incentives. Reward and promote people who share knowledge with others outside their units—not just those who only deliver outstanding unit results.
 Formalize cross-unit interactions. Supervisors’ absence from BP peer-group meetings encourages both confrontation and collegial support. One collaboration pushed unit leader David Eyton to cut operating costs by $6 million—and design a plan for greater, long-term savings.
 Limit cross-unit interactions to those connected to bottom-line results. This leaves managers time to run their own businesses and builds trust as people achieve core goals together.
 Replace bloated Rolodexes with “human portals.” Identify and cultivate managers who connect people who need information with those who have it. “Portals” know who knows what and what kind of help is needed—often through long company service and experience in multiple roles.
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</article-ideainbrief>Despite their best efforts, most companies continue to squander what may be their greatest asset in today’s knowledge economy: the wealth of expertise, ideas, and latent insights that lies scattered across or deeply embedded in their organizations. And that’s a shame, because capitalizing on those intellectual resources—using existing knowledge to improve performance or combining strands of knowledge to create something altogether new—can help companies respond to a surprising array of challenges, from fending off smaller, nimbler rivals to integrating businesses shoved together in a merger.

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Introducing T-Shaped Managers:&nbsp;Knowledge Management&rsquo;s Next Generation

The knowledge economy demands a new kind of executive, one who freely shares ideas and expertise across the company while remaining fiercely committed to business unit performance. But T-shaped managers must be carefully cultivated. Here’s how.

Introducing T-Shaped Managers: Knowledge Management’s Next Generation

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