Dr. Prusak is a Lecturer for the Master of Science in Information and Knowledge Strategy master's program at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies. He also is Director of Research of Knowledge Strategies, LLC, which is engaged in research and consulting services with a focus on knowledge and learning.

Dr. Prusak has been researching, consulting, and teaching on the subjects of knowledge and learning for the past twenty-five years. Previously, he was founder and Executive Director of IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, Principal and Research Director of the Ernst and Young Center for Business Innovation, and Senior Advisor to McKinsey and Co., NASA, and the World Bank.

He has guest lectured and taught in over 30 Universities worldwide and has written and edited eight books and over fifty articles. He has also given over 200 speeches and presentations. His book Working Knowledge, written with Thomas Davenport, has sold over a quarter of million copies and has been translated into 17 languages. It has been cited in scholarly literature over 24,000 times. In addition, he has consulted to many of the world’s largest organizations as well as advising several government agencies and NGOs.

Relevance to Knowledge Flow

Prusak reframed knowledge as something that moves through relationships, trust, and context — not repositories. His work dismantles the myth that knowledge can be “captured” independent of the people and practices that produce it.

Knowledge Flow builds directly on this insight: systems must support conversation, interpretation, and reuse — not just storage. Without social pathways, information stagnates and organizations lose their capacity to learn.

Prusak famously said, “If that word (knowledge) means more than the knower knows, they're trying to sell you a system.” True working knowledge is personal, contextual, and often unspoken. Not just data in a database, but the skill to do something, residing in the space between people and requiring trust to share.