Buckman Labs Is Nothing but Net

At the headquarters of Buckman Laboratories International in Memphis, Tennessee, knowledge is the stuff of legend. A favorite story goes like this: veteran Buckman sales rep Doug Yoder is making a presentation to a handful of engineers at a paper company that represents a $1 million order.

"At Buckman," he begins, "when you ask one person a question, you have the power of 1,200 employees behind you -- including our CEO, Bob Buckman." Eyes wander.

Yoder turns it up a notch. "Our added value is not only speed of response but also global solutions." The engineers fidget.

Yoder continues. "Our knowledge network is a pillar of our culture. And it's there to help you."

To make the point, he fires up his laptop, logs onto the Buckman knowledge sharing system -- K'Netix -- and poses a question to the appropriate technical forum.

The answer comes from Brazil -- and it's from Bob Buckman. He and Yoder spend the next 20 minutes online, addressing the paper company's specific concerns.

Yoder finally logs off. "When I say everyone at Buckman Laboratories accesses the forum, I mean everyone." The paper company engineers are impressed.

Buckman Laboratories, a $270 million company with 1,200 people in 80 countries, makes more than 1,000 different specialty chemicals in 8 factories around the world. But its real product is knowledge. Bigger companies in sexier industries are busy talking about knowledge, scrambling to hire chief knowledge officers, and wrestling with the computer technology to capture a corporate knowledge base. To Bob Buckman and his group of globe-trotting salespeople, that's old news: been there, done that, got the floppy.

Buckman and his people began treating knowledge as their most critical corporate asset in 1992. As a result, Buckman Labs has become a Mecca for other companies looking for "how-to" lessons in the art and science of knowledge management. Executives from AT& T, 3M, Champion International, International Paper Company, and USWest have made the pilgrimage to this small, privately held chemical company to look and learn. What they've seen is a company that is fast, global, and interactive, built on a system that is simple, powerful, and revolutionary.

"You can't really understand the transformation that has happened until you come in here," drawls Bob Buckman, the company's 58-year-old CEO and resident knowledge visionary. "I need a chalkboard."

In the conference room adjacent to his office there's a table, a chalkboard, and an easel, one of many that decorate the company's offices. Each bears a different saying. This one has a quote from Machiavelli: "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." Buckman goes to the chalkboard and starts scribbling furiously.

"The customer is most important," he barks, sounding more like a southern football coach giving a half-time chalk-talk than a CEO. He draws an inverted pyramid with the customer at the top. "We need to be effectively engaged on the front line, actively involved in satisfying the needs of our customers."

"We need to cut the umbilical cord," he continues -- a reference to the mainframe mentality that kept people tied to the office. Buckman rattles off the numbers. "If you work a 40-hour week, you're in the office less than 25% of your time. If you travel 40% of the workweek, you're in the office less than 15% of your time. And if you're a salesperson, you're in the office 0% of your time."

Part techno-visionary, part hard-nosed businessman, Bob Buckman poses the challenge of competition in the knowledge-intensive '90s: Close the gap with the customer. Stay in touch with each other. Bring all of the company's brainpower to bear in serving each customer. "The real questions are," says Buckman, "How do we stay connected? How do we share knowledge? How do we function anytime, anywhere -- no matter what?"

The Real Power of Knowledge

The answer that Bob Buckman came up with was the knowledge network -- K'Netix.

It came to him eight years ago, when he was flat on his back, confined to bed after rupturing his back. Unable to get up, unable even to sit up, Buckman propped a laptop computer on his belly and took dead aim on the real power of knowledge.

"Lying there thinking how isolated I was," says Buckman, recalling his two weeks in bed. "I got to thinking about what I wanted."

What he wanted was information, not just for himself but for all his people, a steady stream of information about products, markets, customers. And he wanted it to be easily accessible, easily shared. A relentless student of business and management writing, he had recently read a comment from Jan Carlzon, the former head of SAS, and it had struck a chord with him: "An individual without information cannot take responsibility; an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility."