Information Research Weblog

En route from Sweden yesterday I picked up the FT and discovered an interesting article on management fads.

The story is summed up in the first para:

Don't look now, but the zeitgeist has changed. While the last two decades of the 20th century produced wave after wave of new management ideas - total quality management, business process re-engineering, knowledge management, e-commerce - the first few years of the new millennium have been, for want of a better word, fadless.

Interestingly, knowledge management figures not at all in the piece, apart from that mention, but it clearly fits Abrahamson's notion that a fad is associated with "emotionally charged, enthusiastic and unreasoned discourse" :-)

The paper points out that the consultancy companies are suffering currently after growing at a compound rate of 20% throughout the 80s and 90s, so perhaps km has not been the big life-safer they hoped for - signalled by its disappearance from some of their Web sites.

A worthwhile read.