1. Actually, most researchers say that people open up pretty easily, maybe because they're often in their own home or workplace.
2. Ok, so one of the challenges that faced ancient civilizations like Egypt was time keeping, calendars. When you have to grow food for whole cities of people, it is important to plant your crops at the right time.
3. So today we will look at how the Egyptians addressed these problems. In fact, they ended up using two different calendars, one to keep track of the natural world, or their... their agriculture concerns, and another one that was used to keep track of the business functions of the Kingdom.
4. The success of their agriculture system depended upon them knowing when the river would change. So, naturally, their first calendar was divided up into three seasons, each based on the river’s changes: inundation, subsidence and harvest.
5. And afterwards during the season of subsidence, the water would subside, or recede, revealing a new layer of fertile black silt and allowing for the planting of various crops. And finally the time of the year would arrive when the valley would produce crops, such as wheat, barley, fruit, all ready to harvest.
6. And in today's lecture I'm going to talk about what can go wrong when businesses try to copy their own best practices. Once a business has successfully introduced a new process managing a branch bank, say, or selling a new product. The parent organization naturally wants to repeat that success, and capture it if possible on a bigger scale.
7. The goal, then, is to utilize existing knowledge and not to generate new knowledge. It's a less glamorous activity than pure innovation, but it actually happens more often, as a matter of fact.
8. Let's consider one reason for failure, placing too much trust in the people who are running the successful operation, the experts shall we say. Managers who want to apply existing knowledge typically start off by going to an expert such as the person who designed and is running a successful department store, and picking their brains.
9. Now, this approach can be used if you want to gain a rough understanding of a particular system, or understand smaller, isolated problems. The trouble is, even the expert doesn't fully grasp the whole thing because when it comes to complex systems, the individual components of the process are interwoven with one another.
10. For instance, a lot of details of the system are invisible to managers. Some may be difficult to describe, learned on the job and will known by workers perhaps, but impossible to describe in a way that's helpful. And there are some things that people know or do that they're not even aware of.
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