We give a lot of talks and presentations about the ways and places companies and their employees learn the fastest. We call these learning environments creation spaces — places where individuals and teams interact and collaborate within a broader learning ecology so that performance accelerates.
During these discussions, it's inevitable that somebody raises their hand. "Wait a minute," they say, "isn't this just knowledge management all over again?"
It's an understandable concern. Knowledge management, after all, was probably the hottest topic in management in the 1990s. "If only our company knew what our company knows" was the mantra in those days. With knowledge becoming the most important factor of production, surely competitive success awaited those companies that could effectively manage what their employees knew.