How Do Businesses and Generations Maintain Its Legacy‪?‬

Employees exit an organization with 80% of the knowledge they have acquired without transferring it to others. This colossal loss of intellectual assets is even more in terms of parent to child legacy transfer. Several factors may have contributed to this immense generational memory loss. First, the knowledge seekers do not know what to do on how to influence the knowledge sources to share their skills and experiences and may not even understand the characteristics of the knowledge they intend to access from the knowledge sources. Second, these intellectual assets such as skills and experiences they intend to access give the knowledge sources their comparative advantage in the society and worst still, they are not on the pages of procedures or other documented format, but mainly domicile in the heads of the possessors and hence not visible to others. Third, people also regard their skills and experiences as invaluable intellectual assets and hence do not want to easily share it with others. These are some of the constraints knowledge seekers face, whether in an organization or the society while trying to access the information they require in creating value in their respective domains. Eventually, the legacies transferred to the knowledge seekers fall short of what would have been transferred if the knowledge seeker knows otherwise.

This book bridges this gap by providing a strategic and systematic approach on how a knowledge seeker may apply social interaction variables and its hierarchical effect on knowledge transfer to influence a knowledge source to share his or her intellectual assets that he or she might not ordinarily be willing to share with any knowledge seeker.