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A community of practice has been set up by Amadeus Corporation, a global travel services company, at their world headquarters. Every General Manager of their subsidiary companies participates !

Traditionally, head office reporting meetings meant giving updates on national goals achieved against annual business plan. In other words, along with head office developments dissemination, it remained largely a reporting exercise. Amadeus discovered a more powerful way of boosting global sales than just an episodic reporting on activities. It budgeted in a peer-to-peer learning practice that epitomises the new knowledge management ethos in the company.

The global CEO decided to get GMs to regularly share their success stories in great detail and in person. Thus the 'Best Practice Forum' was birthed amongst GMs from 80 countries who now meet face-to-face biannually. In particular :

(i)  A GM identifies and presents some key strategies, initiatives and tactics that are key drivers to their company performance.

(ii) The other GMs listen and critique the strategy and provide suggestions.

(iii) All GMs must choose someone else's marketing strategy and, at the very same conference, commit to the group how they will go ahead and implement some or all of it when they return home.

(iv) In subsequent forums the GM is asked to review the progress of the new initiative they committed their business to from last meeting. Then their colleagues individually rate the success of the initiative. At every forum, the GM who has made the most progress is formally recognised by the CEO and the whole forum.

The migration to this knowledge management practice amongst senior executives is depicted as follows.

The early results have been impressive.

Subsidiary leaders are having qualitative discussions and learnings amongst their peers, uniting the global organisation and minimising feelings of superiority, inferiority or isolationism amongst subsidiaries.

Senior executives can testify that they have strengthened their leadership competency levels by this method, therefore validating it to be a genuine knowledge management practice.

A significant increase in new, successful strategic initiatives and best practices have been undertaken, that executives believe have added substantial value to their national revenues and profits.

Amadeus has started on the road to new-generation knowledge management by instituting accountable best practice forums amongst its leaders... a community of practice. A powerful company spirit is being developed through this extended sharing and reviewing. It may soon consider cascading this KM model to various levels of the organisation.

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Reference

Company presentation (2002) Facilitating Learning and Sharing Best Practices.
Australian Human Resource Institute, Annual Conference. May.