The Sugarwork blog
Practical ideas on capturing what your people know, and putting it to work.
- When growth reveals what your operations were hiding: Scaling is one of the most exciting moments for any business.
- How mapping knowledge prepares your enterprise for change: When Australia overhauled its aged care funding system last year, it put providers in the industry to a real test.
- Better by design: the efficiency gains hiding inside your operations: The operational efficiency gains most organisations are looking for are already inside the business.
- Your process map is probably out of date. Here's why that matters.: It's a familiar scene. A room full of smart people. Sticky notes on whiteboards.
- Your team is teaching AI how your business works. Shouldn't you own that knowledge?: Alex Karp recently laid out nine points in one post on X about AI sovereignty, arguing that companies were giving away their most valuable asset: the…
- Ford just rehired 300 engineers. It's a lesson every business should take seriously.: This week, a Ford vice president stood in front of reporters and said the company was rehiring 300 "grey beard" engineers and quality inspectors they’d…
- What leaves when your best people retire (and how to keep it): When the retirement announcement comes, the reaction is almost always the same. A genuine celebration of someone who's given a great deal.
- AI is doing to institutional knowledge what globalization did to industrial economies: When people talk about the communities that bore the cost of deindustrialisation, the image is usually a closed factory or a struggling high street.
- The step that gets new hires up to speed three times faster: Picture a new operations hire, three weeks in, sharp, motivated, genuinely trying.
- The "secret sauce" problem every AI project eventually runs into: At a major AI summit in Sydney this week, Telstra's CEO took the stage alongside some of the biggest names in Australian business.
- Your COO already knows why your AI isn't working: There's a number that keeps surfacing in conversations with operations leaders right now, and it tends to produce a reaction somewhere between relief and…
- Your AI investment is only as good as the knowledge underneath it: There’s a particular kind of meeting happening in operations teams right now. Someone is presenting the AI roadmap.
- Where does the knowledge go when 8,000 people walk out the door?: Layoffs are often talked about in terms of cost savings. They should be seen as capability destruction.
- Unlocking tacit knowledge: the next frontier in GenAI for enterprises: Over the past year and a half, we have all been wowed by amazing examples of Generative AI, created by clever and amusing prompts, and seemingly constant…
- 50%+ of retiring workers are in leadership positions: here’s how to retain their institutional knowledge: Baby Boomers have been the mainstay of the American economy for decades.
- Restructuring? You may be leaving tens of millions of dollars on the table.: Through any restructure, whether M&A, off- or near-shoring, debt, cost, or other business transformations, you lose a great deal of talent — high performing…
- Institutional knowledge is a $47 million/year opportunity for US businesses — here's how to approach it: You may have heard the story of the retired engineer who is called back to fix a machine after the business had already asked a number of expensive experts…