Business organizations are constantly being presented with new ideas, concepts, buzzwords, and fads with which to improve their productivity, their quality, and their competitive edge. Thus we've seen companies doing their best to implement TQM, QFD, JIT, BPR, and a dozen other ideas -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not. In the early 1990s, one of the more intriguing ideas was that of the "learning organization," as popularized by Peter Senge and others. The idea was that organizations that can learn faster, and disseminate that learning more effectively among their employees, would be better able to respond to a fast-changing competitive environment. In more recent years, the related concept of "knowledge management" (KM) has emerged as a more concrete manifestation of the learning organization.