BusinessTN

At a time when people still used videocassettes and cell phones roughly the size of beer steins, Buckman Laboratories was issuing employees company e-mail accounts through CompuServe. As routine as it sounds now, at the time the suggestion was almost as radical as suggesting that Canadians would win the World Series or that Bill Clinton would take the White House—both of which happened the following year.

A specialty chemical company based in the heart of midtown Memphis, family-owned (through BuLabs Holdings) Buckman Laboratories makes more than $500 million in annual sales producing a broad range of specialty chemicals like microbicides, enzymes, scale inhibitors, corrosion inhibitors, polymers, dispersants and defoamers, among other products for clients in industries ranging from water treatment to leather production to pulp and paper. One of its largest clients is Memphis-based International Paper.

But in addition to its success in chemicals, the 63-year-old company may be even more influential in something essentially unrelated. A knowledge-sharing trendsetter, Buckman Labs shares bragging rights as a former winner of Teleos' Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (along with the likes of IBM and Google).

Former CEO Bob Buckman flipped the standard business pyramid structure and threw out the practice of sectioning projects into isolated think groups when he opened the input doors with veritable open-source collaboration throughout the company via K'Netix. The cyber platform is essentially a set of forums that allow every member of the company to address concerns and questions for every client or company project. It was a groundbreaking achievement for Buckman, who literally wrote the book on building a knowledge-driven company (Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization, McGraw-Hill 2004).

"The whole community of K'Netix is centered around a culture to get people out of their silos," explains Katherine Buckman Gibson, chairman of the board.

The culture has helped the company grow into markets in 90 countries on six continents and build substantial cash reserves that continue to fund research and development.

And that culture also seems to carry Buckman's ideology out into the community.

"The way we look at it," continues Gibson, "we have 300 employees in Memphis. All of us live here and want it to be the best place to live."

Chief among her concerns, as you'd expect, is the health of local schools. Gibson is proud of the leading role the business community (i.e. Memphis Tomorrow, Memphis Fast Forward, etc.) has taken to improve Memphis through its nascent economic development plan, but she says the company's civic goal is to improve childhood education.

Gibson admits that giving man-hours and money to benefit community scholarship also helps Buckman Labs. After all, Buckman wants to hire locally, but the company also boasts that nearly 80% of its employees worldwide have college degrees. Since Memphis has continually come up short in providing a deep, educated talent pool to fill the needs of leading local companies, that means Buckman has a personal interest in raising the scholastic bar if it wants to draw on the local job pool.