Different knowledge, same ****

James D talks about this paper from this paper from Haas & Hansen. It talks about the impact of the use of different knowledge resources by consulting sales teams. A lot of it rings true. I observed proposal teams working under tight deadlines rip off leverage previous proposal documents. This did not always result in a winning proposal as clients tended to prefer proposals tailored to them. The authors emphasize that different sources of knowledge are not necessarily "fungible" - i.e. you cannot replace expert insight with more documents:

This suggests that firms that primarily compete on quality can benefit most from emphasizing personal advice usage (and perhaps downplaying electronic document usage), while the opposite holds for firms relying on efficiency.

Which frankly is not such a surprise but nice to see in black-and-white. Of course, for many organisations, it is not a straight-forward decision between quality and efficiency but some combination of the two.