Introduction:

The lifecycles of new management ideas that generate enough interest and action to become significant movements have distinctive contours. Some are like tsunamis, briefly overwhelming the business landscape, then disappearing, leaving mainly destruction and disappointment in their wake. Others develop more slowly and last longer, making permanent contributions to organizational practice and theory. The quality movement in manufacturing is a good example of this type. Quality is no longer an active movement because its most successful practices have been incorporated into the way work is normally done; it is no longer necessary to have hordes of quality gurus and quality officers promoting those processes and behaviors.

A few movements change over time, reshaping and regenerating themselves as words and concepts take on new meanings over a period of months or at most a few years, and perspectives and approaches develop that are different from those widely used earlier – different enough to define new generations of the movement. The knowledge management movement is one of these. A strong focus on knowledge might seem an obvious, natural part of an executive’s agenda at any time, but the apparently obvious often gives way to current financial expectations and needs. It may be useful to look briefly at the generations of knowledge management to understand its probable lasting contribution and where it may be headed now.

A word of caution: the real history of anything, including management ideas, is always more mixed and complex than the descriptions that try to make sense of it. It is tempting, when we talk about different generations, to present them as monolithic and suggest that the second or third generation is wholly different from the preceding one. Real life is not that neat. In the case of knowledge management, we can find “third generation” ideas and practices here and there during the first generation of the movement and even more frequently see people and organizations stuck on first generation practices when the movement as a whole as moved on. Nevertheless, the generational differences in predominant KM thought and practice are clear and important.