The purpose of the Knowledge Leadership Forum is to enable member firms to enhance marketplace, financial, and operational performance through the effective use of knowledge and organizational learning.

The KLF has been established explicitly to create a forum in which KM practitioners can engage around topics and issues they consider relevant and important. Practitioners are individuals who work in corporate and governmental organizations and who have KM responsibilities. While their titles vary considerably, each person leads KM development and execution.

KLF members are quite focused on the business value of KM and understand how it must relate to making companies more competitive. They share both successes and failures with uncommon candor.

The Forum meets face-to-face three times per year, for a day and a half each time. Member companies host some meetings while others are held in conjunction with knowledge-related organizations.

For example, The Institute for the Future, West Point Military Academy, Harvard Business School, US Naval Academy are site meeting locations. There is extensive networking between meetings to share best and worst practices as people tap into the wealth of experience across our membership.

The Forum consists of a diverse member group across industries, geographies, and approaches to managing knowledge.

These individuals are recognized knowledge leaders in their member companies. Although their job titles vary, they have responsibility for knowledge strategy, technology deployment, customer solution innovation, leadership development, and organizational learning.

Companies and individuals become members by invitation only. Companies can nominate others for membership.

The meetings always involve open sharing of what is working and more importantly what is not working. A high level of trust and relationships across the group enable an exceptionally high level of exchange that is both practical and timely.

Key meeting features include a unique opportunity for members to offer up a tough challenge that they are facing and get feedback from the members. Processes routinely used during the meetings include Peer Assists and Knowledge Cafes. As the KLF is made up of the most seasoned practitioners in Knowledge Management, the meetings offer a significant opportunity to tap into the best minds in the business and to address the most challenging issues.

We often have interesting meeting locations and activities associated with each location. For example, the KLF group was able to eat lunch with 4000 cadets in the mess hall at West Point, tour the Spy Museum in Washington DC, take a NASCAR ride around Lowe’s Motor Speedway and attend a Boston Philharmonic concert with Ben Zander conducting.

KLF is a member driven organization. Participants form an executive committee to help develop the Forum’s content and direction. They also suggest topics for each meeting, develop small working groups to address specific issues, and contribute “cases” from their own organizations as appropriate around noteworthy events and developments. Member firms are encouraged to host meetings or special events.

The sponsoring organization is Leadership Forum Inc, with Dr. Liam Fahey as an owner/partner. Liam serves as our academic advisor and participates on our executive committee. He is a prolific author and consults with Fortune 500 companies on a variety of topics that include competitive analysis and knowledge management.

KLF provides two principal means for participants to interact and learn from each other: face-to-face meetings and a KLF community website.

There are three meetings per year, each about a day and a half in length. The meetings offer an in-depth exploration of some aspect of managing knowledge (for example, how to build a knowledge culture; methods for sharing knowledge).

The KLF website is a members’ only, dedicated and secure virtual community. It allows members to connect between meetings to address urgent needs as well as to develop discussions and content for future meetings.

• Interacting with peers around critical issues in managing knowledge
• Learning and assessing what leading edge firms are doing to advance the practice of managing knowledge
• Dialogue with invited guests from other leading edge companies around emerging new practices — both organizational and technological
• Exposure to research conducted by leading thinkers from many institutional settings (including universities, consulting firms, dedicated research programs, and corporations)
• Access to multiple forms of written outputs including materials from meetings, new analysis frameworks, descriptions of best practices, documented “cases” outlining individual firms’ approaches to management knowledge tasks and issues, and summaries of electronic interactions
• Access to the KLF virtual community that includes: materials from past meetings, member profiles, member highlights and KM news, extensive online discussion forums on a variety of subjects, a site secure wiki for collaborative content creation, favorite web links of members and a gallery of photos and videos of various KM resources and techniques.

If you are interested in finding out more about the KLF or are considering joining the group, please e-mail the KLF member chair Erick Thompson at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

If you have questions about the KLF group, call Mary Lou Donovan at 919-309-4024 or e-mail her at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .