Management.

It is some years since Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline set out to make organisations aware of how, in the years ahead, the management and channelling of its knowledge would replace other physical entities as its key asset. However, only now are UK companies really starting to get to grips with the practical ramifications of this self-evident truth.

A few – strangely perhaps, given their troubled pasts, Rover Group and its former parts division Unipart spring to mind – seem to be making honest efforts to match the best in the world. But otherwise what commitments have been made appear to be little more than skin-deep.

Most management concepts are a good deal easier to talk than to walk.

And none more so than this one. A chief executive can tell dinner parties and conferences how his organisation has put its faith in learning, but if the workforce or management fails to improve performance, continuing to make the same old mistakes, those claims are going to look more than a little hollow.

The important thing they have to remember is that, if ever there was an initiative that could not be characterised as a quick fix, this was it. The companies that are regarded as exemplars in this area are generally either those that, like US electronics company Hewlett-Packard, know nothing else or, as in the case of the Scandinavian financial services group Skandia, have started to make huge commitments to the idea, both financially and emotionally.

Sadly, much of the evidence suggests that this will not be the case with most UK organisations. To be fair, not all of these companies’ rivals have adopted the idea with any great enthusiasm either.

However, it is one thing for an individual organisation to fail to make the most of an idea and quite another for industry as a whole to miss the point. To judge from a recently established national initiative, those in high places seem to think that learning is some kind of marketing edge that can be acquired through a few hours in night school. If you think that is being too cynical, just consider that promotion was a key part of the initiative’s launch earlier this year. The man in charge of this area, former Lever Brothers chief executive Andrew Seth, used as his theme “Marketing learning like washing powder” – yes, seriously – and introduced the concept of learning vouchers, under which retailers and education providers would band together in order to entice people into the classroom.

Clearly everything has to start somewhere. But this is a little basic. It is bad enough schools relying on parents collecting their supermarket shopping bags for their equipment. Surely, industry can see a little further beyond the end of its nose than this.

As with other ventures set up under the aegis of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, this one has its heart in the right place. Alongside the Tomorrow’s Company inquiry, which aims to promote the idea of the sort of socially responsible body of which Will Hutton would approve, the Campaign for Learning is difficult to fault as a concept.

Mirroring education as a whole, organisational learning is what they call a motherhood idea. Few right-thinking souls would challenge this, so it is remarkable that the campaign’s leading lights were surprised when the research they had commissioned showed most people saw the value of learning. They thought one of their key roles would be to promote awareness of the idea. They were also taken by surprise when work and lack of time were frequently cited as key reasons for people not doing more to improve their own learning. This perhaps indicates exactly how out of touch with everyday life many senior executives really are.

The prescription from the campaign – whose backers include the Bank of England, British Airways, BT, the Post Office, J Sainsbury and Unilever – is that employees should make time and spend less of it watching television.

The implication from this is that learning is all about reading a textbook in the library or taking out a corporate video. This is true to an extent, of course. But it is a long way from the whole story. It is generally agreed that knowledge in the organisational sense is not a lot of help if it is collected and retained in isolation; it is the sharing and enhancing of it that makes something valuable out of a raw material.

Consequently, organisations seriously seeking an edge in this area make huge investments in such enablers as IT, in teams designed to improve co-operation and so productivity, and even in the physical layout of their premises, so that employees are encouraged to chat to each other around coffee machines and the like. Yes, they spend a lot of time, training their people – both on the job and in the classroom. But they do not expect instant results.

It is not absolutely necessary to follow in the footsteps of Motorola, National Semiconductor and now Unipart, and establish a company university – though that can be a physical demonstration that the organisation is not leaving everything up to the individual. But it does seem to be a prerequisite of success that there be some kind of structure to the process rather than a general edict that employees should go away and bury their heads in some management tract instead of sitting down for another episode of “Coronation Street” when they get home.

The recent past is littered with initiatives that have been embraced for short periods only to be abandoned through disenchantment, boredom or whatever. When was the last time you heard anybody talking about the British quality standard? Yet, only a couple of years ago this was seen as the means of raising the UK industrial game.

This is not to say that quality is no longer important. It is just that many others have given up on it once they have been forced to get down to the nuts and bolts of it. They have discovered that writing a commitment to quality into their mission statements was the easy bit.

All the signs are that the same will happen with knowledge and learning.

Stationery companies can expect a bonanza as companies affix the words “Learning Organisation” to their letterheads. But do not be surprised if there is little substance behind the logos. And do not be too disappointed if – far from achieving the campaign’s aim of having a “learning society” in the UK by the year 2000 – we are all grappling with some other instant solution to our ills.

Roger Trapp is management editor of the Independent and Independent On Sunday.