Others, including Jean and Etienne, have been less restrictive. For some time, the hardest thing has been to identify their real problems because of the hype and the management nostrums. Now there's much talk of managing knowledge. When that's reduced to manipulating information, it too hides the real problems. But at their heart, I do think that creating and managing knowledge are defining features of organizations.
Paratroopers are often purveyors of fads and fashion.
Consultants give managers whiplash, for example, by facing them towards issues of process and structure before suddenly announcing it's time to start looking at practice and people. So paratroopers tend to present managers with radical alternatives that spin them in circles. Managers learn when they encounter a tension to overcome that tension, whereas John Seely Brown and I tend to think that this is an inescapable tension. In the end, absolutely. Each one of those is always threatening to overcome the other.