Mary Abraham, Knowledge Manager for Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, points us to a Harvard Business School report in a recent entry of her excellent blog:

Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge reports on a new study that demonstrates that while past performance may be a reasonable indicator of future performance, “the quality of colleagues in his or her organization also has a significant impact on the [star's] ability to maintain the highest quality output.” In other words, hiring a star without the supporting team will greatly diminish your chances of replicating or exceeding past performance.

and asks the following questions at the end:

What does your knowledge management staff look like? A group of under-engaged disaffected individuals? A collection of motivated but unsupported stars? A team of diverse people that consistently produces high quality work product?

Well, I would definitively agree that the quality of the colleagues has a significant impact. Dedication and passion for KM are also key ingredients. What I particularly appreciate at SAP is the right mix of achieving specific objectives for the business (“what”) and having a lot of degrees of freedom in the choice of the methods (“how to achieve the goals”).
Thanks to the KnowledgeBoard newsletter to allude to Mary’s blog.