Multiple Businesses and Company Know-How

There are two different qualities of what is referred to by the term “know-how.”

• What the “corporation” has

• What a particular employee “individual” has

• If an individual employee is knocked unconscious in a car accident on the way home today, the “know-how that the corporation has” can be used by other employees from tomorrow onward.

• What it is not, and what it cannot do without that person, is “the know-how that the individual has.

• When we talk about “allowing duplication of labor with know-how,” we seem to unconsciously think only of the former, when in fact we are talking about a blend of both types of know-how.

• If the blending ratio is known, it is logical to prorate the profit generated by the duplication of work, but in many cases it is not known, and the cost of trying to define it clearly would prevent the duplication of work.

• So if a company wants to promote multiple jobs, it would have to roughly knock it down to the individual side, including in terms of providing incentives.

• To narrow the focus to writing specifically, “If the author is knocked unconscious in a car accident, can another employee take over and complete the project?” and if they can’t take over, then the majority of the profit is generated by “personal know-how.

  • The skill to weave a sentence or other skills are less tangible, but they are resources that belong to the individual and cannot be transferred to the corporation.

• Although the above discussion focused only on the blend ratio of know-how, the proportionate ratio should be determined by the ratio of all resources used to produce the results, not just the blend ratio of know-how.

• Specifically speaking, “time” is an important resource. For example, if a book is written with “95% personal know-how” and “95% company work time,” the question of how to prorate the book becomes a vexing one.

  • I write outside of work hours because I can’t be bothered with the vexing issue.
  • This is an individual’s optimization to avoid hassle, so it’s not clear if the company as a whole is optimizing.

• Some are concerned about how they acquired their “know-how.”

  • The idea is that what is acquired through company work (i.e., activities paid for by the company) is “company know-how”.

• Response to this

  • The idea that “what one acquires through activities paid for by the company is the company’s know-how” is merely his/her interpretation.
  • Depending on what happens when an “individual” who has acquired this know-how changes jobs.
    • Can be removed from the individual and left in the company.
    • Inseparable from the individual, they go to a new job.
  • There are two different types of “know-how of a different nature”. This is an observed fact.
  • You are free to consider know-how that is inseparable from the individual as “the company’s know-how because the company paid for it,” but just because you claim so does not mean that the know-how will remain with the company when the individual changes jobs, so it is just an assumption that is not in line with reality.

• reference - Intellectual workers own the means of production.

• In the past, when lifetime employment was the norm, job changes were rare, so there were cases where the strategy of “keeping know-how inside the company to maintain a competitive advantage” worked, based on the rule that “what you acquire through activities paid for by the company is the company’s know-how and should not be released outside the company.

• However, the situation has changed dramatically, and this strategy no longer works, and it is now important to obtain know-how from outside the company, which is what Henry Chesbrough proposed in his book “open innovation.

  • https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/オープンイノベーション

• Dual-employment” is a strategy of “expanding the pipeline to the outside world by allowing people to work across company boundaries,” and I think it is a strategy that is similar to open innovation.

• double-dealing and the company’s know-how.

---

This page is auto-translated from /nishio/複業と会社のノウハウ using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.