HBR Blog Network...

As a teenager, Mike Pfotenhauer loved to hike, but he hated how uncomfortable he felt carrying the backpacks then on the market. So, at age 16, he created his own, sewing all the pieces together himself.

5 Ways to Design Products Customers Love

All companies have subject matter experts who hold knowledge critical to their businesses. As a leader, how can you make sure to not only preserve that know-how for future generations but also multiply its impact?

How Your Organization's Experts Can Share Their Knowledge

Research demonstrates that making training too easy for learners actually deters retention of material. What we need is "desirable difficulty".

Why Organizations Need to Make Learning Hard

Better pay, more joy in the job, or prerequisite to promotion? Whatever your reasons for deciding to build expertise in a new field, the question is how to get there.

How to Build Expertise in a New Field

Asked if he would be willing to share his hard-earned knowledge with others in the company before he retired, the engineer laughed. "Why would I do that?"

How to Prevent Experts from Hoarding Knowledge

Across the globe, there is a tsunami of Baby Boomer retirements. This is good news for them and for the younger colleagues who will take their place. But what does this mean in terms of losing business-critical, experience-based knowledge — what we call deep smarts?

What's Lost When Experts Retire

While “Big Data,” IBM's Watson and self—driving cars may command the headlines, for the foreseeable future, we will continue to tap the expertise of deeply smart humans to recognize patterns, respond to context, and make final decisions.

Robots & Deep Smarts

Why would any organization set up a system that discourages experts from sharing their business-critical knowledge?

Rehiring Retirees as Consultants Is Bad Business

Children in the U.S. today interact much less with their physical environment than they used to. Few grow up building fences, designing go-karts or tinkering with their cars anymore; vocational high schools are all but closed. It's no surprise that U.S. manufacturers find it harder to hire workers with tactile smarts.

Why Kids — and Workers — Need to Get Their Hands Dirty

WSJ Blogs...

It sounds like a win-win: Companies hire valued employees back to work as consultants in retirement, giving the business access to critical expertise and giving the worker a nice cash cushion without the demands of the full-time job. But this is a dangerous, short–term solution to scarcity of deep smarts.

Rehire a Retiree? Maybe Not.

Podcasts

• Critical Knowledge Transfer: Tools for Managing Your Company's Deep Smarts - December 11, 2014