Larry Prusak

The news started to trickle in last night that Larry had died over the weekend.  Thereafter I found myself waking up frequently with a new memory of one of the founders of the field of knowledge management, although he never liked the term.  For those now familiar one of the strengths of KM is that it had no single founder.  Back in 2006 I summarised that history as follows:  “Bob Buckman pioneering the use of collaborative computing; APQC organising the first major KM event; Larry Prusak and Tom Davenport moving into the space from Information Management (and with to my mind one of the best books in Working Knowledge); Gordon Petrash with IP work at Dow, Tom Stewart and Leif Edvinsson with Intellectual Capital Management; Elizabeth Lank, the unsung pioneer of the Knowledge Cafe.”  But even in that exalted company, Larry was special.  I don’t think I even remember him without a smile on his face with one exception.  We were both presenting at Merck in New Jersey (and there are stories within that story around IBM politics) and I told my taxi driver and the map story.  When I got to the part which involved me stepping off the subway at 125th Street approaching midnight wearing a DJ and carrying an expensive computer his face was a picture.  Larry was in his heart always a New Yorker and he knew what that meant.

Our first meeting was fraught with politics.  I had just moved into a new role following the IBM takeover of DataSciences and was developing a knowledge management programme.   In parallel, the consultancy group in the US brought Larry on board to create their practice and he had just published one of the seminal texts in the field namely Working Knowledge.  They brought him to a public event in London and refused my team access to the session, only finally allowing us to turn up after the event to get ten minutes with the great man.  That set the tone for the next few years with competing groups in IBM until Scott Smith was put in charge of KM for IBM and brokered a peace settlement in the delightful surroundings of Sophia Antipolis as a result of which I joined the IKM in its early days.   In effect, Eric, Joe, and Rob ran programmes, and Larry provided advice, stimulation, and warm and loving support for everyone – that smile again.   In those days I was flying to Boston every month for meetings and the MIT bookshop was a point of pilgrimage.  I’d return laden with books to the Lotus building where IKM was housed and within minutes Larry would be turning over the books, asking why I had chosen this or that and then a few hours later would return with a book he felt I could make better use of than him and press it on me.  He did the same with a jacket once that he didn’t like, thought I would and he was right and then gifted me a recording of Don Giovanni.  He was wonderfully generous, eclectic and empathetic.   When he heard my daughter was interested in the great plague of London (it was a school project) he found a whole list of references and bought her a book on the subject.   I could go on at length and anyone who knows him will recount similar stories.

He stood above the politics in IBM and that was never better illustrated for me than when we had an IKM meeting in Palm Springs.   It was the first after the peace settlement and things were still tense.  I arrived at the hotel and he rushed up to me and asked if I had a car.  I did and he then said he needed to get out of this place and given our shared stationary fetish (we definitely had that in common) he wanted to take me to the Levenger flagship store.  We spent three hours there and came back loaded with writing pads, note pads and god knows what else to be greeted by the IBM political players and dragged into separate rooms to be interrogated as to what we were plotting.  The idea we just liked stationery was so alien to them that they would not accept it and for the rest of the event the questioning continued and any small proposal was seen as evidence of some dark intent.

There are many other memories of when I introduced him to Max Boisot in Spain, the IKM meetings in Dublin and Toronto (by then I had Cynthia in my team) where we developed some of the initial work on narrative, the Santa Fee IKM meeting on complexity and many many other occasions.   When IBM destroyed the IKM by merging it with other groups to create the IBV we were both called in by the new Director (a politically safe appointment) to be told we would have fewer speaking engagements as IBM could sponsor fewer conferences.  We both pointed out that people paid us to speak at conferences, we didn’t need to buy the right and that was probably our death knell.  Larry moved on the Babson College and I set up a new Institute on Complexity which lasted for two years before politics again hit.    When I won the DARPA project on counter-terrorism as an IKM project before 911 he was fascinated by the fact that I was working with John Poindexter – I didn’t know who he was until I had already decided I liked him.  Larry was a solid Democrat so my working with a somewhat notorious Republican excited him.  But he was also a very open and honest man and long conversations ensured; always sought to learn and to see the possibilities in people.

The last time I talked with him at an event was in Malaysia and Patrick Lamb set up a conversation between the two of us.  I argued then that KM was dead and Patrick asked him if he agreed and he just replied Dead Man Walking.   You can see that recording here and it’s also referenced in Stan’s wonderful summary of his work.

I think most of us feared that he was near the end when we read Nancy’s tribute on his retirement from Colombia, but being ready for something doesn’t prepare you for the shock of loss.  Hopefully, we get a proper tribute together for KM World.  A warm, brilliant man and a great loss not just to the field of KM but to humanity.

Banner picture by Artem Sapegin on Unsplash