Once upon a time an article about careers might well have described a "career ladder." The concept was a useful one when organizations were hierarchical in nature and one might progress step by step ever higher in the management hierarchy. Many research studies of such diverse careers as college presidents, career army officers, directors of academic libraries, and chief executive officers concluded that successive positions followed a predictable upward pattern (i.e., a career ladder).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the comfortable clarity and stability that the hierarchy offered is gone. David Skyrme (1999), a frequent writer on knowledge management (KM) topics, summarizes the transformation in business and society that has taken place in the "networked knowledge environment." The defining characteristics of networked organizations, according to Skyrme, are not so much particular organizational structures as they are informal human networking...