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Organizations have never faced a more turbulent, complex or changing environment. Traditional managerial approaches need to be supplemented to enable business to survive. Making sense of complexity requires holistic, lateral, intuitive thinking – right‐brain skills that can be improved and developed. These skills need to become legitimate features to identify, discuss and develop in business settings. Argues that right‐brain skills are vital to the development of the five main qualities of a continuously learning organization: customercentred vision; systemic thinking; alignment; empowerment; and openness. These five characteristics are identified as crucial to organizational success and are explained more fully using practical examples. Concludes that managers will be selected and developed using quite different criteria from those used to build the bureaucracies of the past.

Knowledge Management is now one of the major driving forces of organizational change and wealth creation. This paper reviews some of the major concepts and approaches as discussed at a recent international congress on the subject. Beginning with an examination of some of the factors propelling the global knowledge economy, the paper then explores knowledge‐based organizational strategy, illustrated by a number of case studies from leading practitioners, including British Petroleum, Glaxo Wellcome, ICL, Nokia Telecommunications, the UK Post Office and Zeneca Pharmaceuticals. The concept of intellectual capital lies at the heart of Knowledge Management. Some companies define intellectual capital in terms of value creation, for others it is value extraction. The two different approaches, illustrated by Skandia and the Dow Chemical Company, are reviewed, along with a new tool for measuring intellectual capital.

Colgate‐Palmolive Co. has extended a system, originally used only for global succession‐planning, into a valuable expatriate knowledge database. The database contains information – made available throughout the company’s worldwide network – on each manager’s experience or awareness of different cultures.

Analyses ICL (formerly International Computers, Ltd), founded in 1968, which was taken over (90.1%) by Fujitsu, that operates in over 80 countries and employs 21,000 people — mostly in Europe. Believes that implementing knowledge management — as a key business process — can aid in organizational learning. Comments on Elizabeth Lank, programme director, knowledge management at ICL, whose mission (Holy Grail) is to focus management attention on identifying, managing and sharing knowledge ideas and expertise as a key asset throughout ICL. Further discusses the programme to implement a knowledge management programme in ICL, plus possible hurdles. Warns there are major traps on the way to grasping this particular Holy Grail.

CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS, like all well‐publicized figures of the present day, are well enough known to the world. Thanks to the advertising of publishers, the ubiquity of television, cinema newsreels, newspaper gossip writers, personal appearances to sign copies of new books and, above all, the perfection of modern photography, there can be few writers to‐day who are not known to their public as faces. Yet, on the whole, present‐day authors' faces are a mundane lot. Few literary figures can now be called spectacular to look at. There are a few lank, long‐haired, ethereal figures, one or two striking beards, and a handful of faintly exotic types, but in the main, present‐day authors (and authoresses, for that matter) are a dull crowd, indistinguishable in a thousand people picked at random. They are stodgy, rather bored in countenance, sucking overdone pipes, or peering owlishly from behind commonplace horn‐rimmed spectacles. All the spectacular figures have gone. Bernard Shaw was the last reminder of the spacious days when a literary man appeared his part. We no longer have the gigantic majesty of G. K. Chesterton, the aristocratic demeanour of A. E. W. Mason, or the cadaverous, bearded mask of D. H. Lawrence, while the bewhiskered dignity of Trollope and Dickens now seems but a myth.

What is the learning organization? Why is it important? Learning is often seen as an individual level activity but organizational learning is concerned with collective learning processes. The second half is an annotated bibliography of key books in the field.

In reporting to the Board early in 1906 on inquiries as to meat inspection in London; Dr. Buchanan drew attention to the need for a better understanding, in the interests of the British consumer, of the conditions under which meat and meat foods are prepared abroad for exportation to the United Kingdom, of the various systems of inspection or control adopted abroad in the case of such meats, and of the significance to be attached to the presence or absence of official inspection labels or marks on imported carcass meat and other meat foods.

IT is rare nowadays to discover in the annual or other reports of libraries any reference to current losses of books. There are many sides to this, as to every problem. Formerly it was held that a loss of one volume in an issue of a thousand was a reasonable loss; this our readers know. We do not recall a pronouncement based upon a count of stock and circulation recently. As our pages, and those of other library journals, have shown, the check and control of losses is a really costly business. Nevertheless, as long as we can remember, it has been impressed on librarians that we are custodians of a certain form of public property which we are expected to keep for as long in safety as that property retains its value. It can also be asserted that the discovery of whereabouts in the accounts of a bank a single shilling is missing may occupy hours of staff‐time; it is probably necessary to make it, and this was done a few years ago, and maybe is done now. To pose this problem nowadays, when there is so much else to be done, may be a little tactless. In the present conditions of public regard, or want of it, for the property of others, especially communal property, our eagerness to serve our people without let or hindrance, and the consequent removal of all barriers, wickets and entrance checks even in very busy libraries of large size—are we sure that we are absolved from all responsibility for the care of books?