Former President of the World Bank James Wolfensohn
Jim Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005, who passed away this week, had many accomplishments. One achievement that has so far received scant mention in the many tributes to him is the creation of a knowledge sharing culture in one of the most change-resistant organizations in the world.
In October 1996, at the Annual Meeting of the World Bank in front of around 170 finance ministers and their entourages, Wolfensohn made the bold proposal that the World Bank would be sharing its knowledge with the world: it was to become “the Knowledge Bank.”
The World Bank is staffed with highly educated individuals who over the years had amassed vast experience on what did—or did not—work in accomplishing its mission of poverty reduction. But this experience was mainly lodged in the minds of individual experts. It was thus difficult for other staff to benefit from the knowledge, let alone external clients unless they were getting a loan from the World Bank. Wolfensohn proposed to smash these constraints and make the World Bank’s knowledge systematically available to anyone who needed it, both inside the World Bank and out.
In 1996, with the emergence of the Internet, the idea of knowledge sharing within organizations was just emerging as a hot management topic. Wolfensohn not only immediately embraced the idea: he expanded it to include knowledge sharing beyond the organization’s boundaries with clients and citizens around the world.
October 1996: The Knowledge Bank Is Born
“We have been in the business of researching and disseminating the lessons of development for a long time,” Wolfensohn told the assembled finance ministers on October 1, 1996. “But the revolution in information technology increases the potential value of these efforts by vastly extending their reach. To capture this potential, we need to invest in the necessary systems, in Washington and worldwide, that will enhance our ability to gather development information and experience, and share it with our clients.”
“We need to become, in effect, the Knowledge Bank,” he said. “By networking and pooling our wealth of cross-country experience; capturing the best global thinking and expertise on a given issue, and making it easily accessible to our clients and partners.”
In March 1997, this bold vision was formally adopted by the World Bank board of directors as part of a multi-million-dollar strategic compact.
The Origins Of The Knowledge Bank
The speed and eloquence in which the initiative came into being sheds light on Wolfensohn’s vision and brilliance as a leader, as explained by Sebastian Mallaby in his book, The World’s Banker (Penguin, 2006).
One afternoon in mid-September 1996, Wolfensohn was stuck in a taxi in a traffic jam in New York. He was reading a draft of his speech for the upcoming annual meetings, and he was furious that there was not a single new idea in it. He got out his phone and called Jean-Francois Rischard, the vice-president for industry and finance. “Surely in this organization,” Wolfensohn asked, “there is at least one good idea?”
“As a matter of fact there is,” Rischard answered. “Let me tell you about it.” Rischard explained the concept of knowledge sharing: how the Wold Bank would gather its vast expertise on everything from health, education, civil-service reform to electricity generation and make this available to anyone who needed it by way of the Internet, thus multiplying the power of its ideas in the battle against poverty. Rischard talked for fifteen minutes explaining the idea to Wolfensohn, who was becoming increasingly interested, even intrigued with the idea that knowledge could be as important as money in fighting global poverty. Wolfensohn promised to think about it.
It didn’t take long. That evening, Wolfensohn tried the idea out on his dinner companions. In the light of their enthusiastic response, the next day he asked Rischard to draft a speech on the subject. The day after that, despite explicit opposition from his managing directors, Wolfensohn was laying out his vision for the “Knowledge Bank” to the Bank’s board of directors.
A few days later, Wolfensohn was delivering his speech at the 1996 annual meetings to the astonished finance ministers of the world. Within a year, a hundred “knowledge sharing communities” had sprung up across the Bank, each devoted to establishing global best practice in a technical specialty.
“Remarkably for a public institution,” writes Mallaby, “the World Bank had embraced a management fashion as quickly as its private-sector peers; and the Bank was soon being cited as a model by ‘knowledge gurus.’”
Before Wolfensohn, any such bold initiative at the World Bank would have been reviewed by fifteen different managerial committees, and in due course sliced and diced into something anodyne and incremental. Wolfensohn leaped over the bureaucracy, and forged ahead, based on his instinct to grasp the power of a new idea and to pursue it aggressively.
Not surprisingly, the bureaucracy didn’t give up its opposition to change. But the initiative had wide support from the staff and survived many efforts to kill it. Four years later, by 2000, the World Bank was being benchmarked by the American Productivity and Quality Center as one of the world’s leading knowledge organizations, along with private sector firms such as IBM and Accenture. It was the force and eloquence of Wolfensohn’s vision that had enabled the initiative to be born and to flourish.
During his tenure, Wolfensohn advanced many initiatives to the point where critics of the Bank accused him of pulling the organization into too many different fields. But without question, he introduced new thinking and new approaches to help solve some of the world’s most dire poverty problems.
It's customary in some quarters to see poverty as so intractable, even insoluble, that organizations like the World Bank might as well try boiling the ocean. Statistics show otherwise. Despite setbacks and flaws, massive gains have been made in reducing poverty, particularly in the last three decades. Some countries that are now rich were poor just a few decades ago. Though much remains to be done, it is through the courage and visage of leaders like Jim Wolfensohn that remarkable progress has already been made.
And read also:
How You Change An Organizational Culture
Ten Things You Need To Know About Managing Knowledge
Note: I served as the program director for knowledge management at the World Bank from 1996 to 2000.
