The success of a volume like this can be measured by its power to compel us to browse through its pages (thank goodness for paper!), to take excursions into its texts (praised be prose!), to create or extend relationships with its authors (thank G-d for friends!), to sense the shape of the landscape by hovering over its table of contents (some structure is good!), and, finally, to settle back, lengthen our focal point, and take the time to reflect on critical questions (time, oh precious time!). How did we get here? What, if anything, is being said here that could not have been said before? And why are we saying it now?

The contributors to this volume and the diverse participants at a Darden Graduate School of Business Administration colloquium in spring 2002, which set this book in motion, pose these questions even more pointedly: How have we – the practitioners and stakeholders in the art of creating learning cultures – learned what we know? What do we need to learn next? Beyond articulating these essential questions, the contributors to this volume offer some answers.

It takes twenty years

It was in 1990, with Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, that learning was first catapulted from the peripheral corporate domains of training and development departments to a place much closer to the center of business discourse.