Michael - I don't know if you are already doing this but it might be
helpful to see if there are any studies showing comparisons between
organisations with relatively high and low turnover - is there an impact
on innovation - no. of new product launches, customer satisfaction,
employee measures, perofrmance, share price etc.
Have you defined any metrics against which you compare the companies you
are reviewing.
One area you might want to look at is the larger consultancies - they
are
high knowledge content businesses where the rate of knowledge transfer
and
learning is critical to their perfromance and ability to offer global
service. some have invested heavily in technology to support knowledge
capture and sharing - there may well be some interesting comparisons
avaiable here between those with KM infrastructure and those without.
firms like Andersen con., EY and C&L are heavily researched and there is
a
lot of material on them. another group you might consider in conference
production companies. their model is all about learning a subject fast
to
produce an event and then moving on to the next topic. they wqork hard
at
sharing new knowledge amongst conference production staff. There is also
a
high turnover of such staff.
the issue of staff turnover and loss of learning / knowledge sits behind
many people's forays into knowledge mgt. I'm sure you are already
looking
into this field - a couple of good sites on the subject are Fast Company
at http://www.fastcompany.com Brint at http://www.brint.com/km Knowledge
mgt net at http://www.ozemail.com.au/~caveman/Creative
I hope these thoughts help. I'd be interested in seeing the results of
your research if you'd be willing to make it available over the net.
Regards
Rohit Talwar
Centre for Business Transformation
rtalwarcbt@aol.com