At the end of last year's European Knowledge Management Thought Leaders' Forum, chairperson Victoria Ward remarked that working in knowledge management can be utterly exhausting.

This stimulated a huge amount of discussion among delegates about the personal challenges of being a knowledge management practitioner and what strategies, if any, fellow delegates found successful in addressing those challenges. It seemed a pity to bring the conference to a close in the midst of such animated conversation.

At this year's forum, held in London at the end of September, it was again encouraging to see such a wide variety of industries represented. Organisations that were represented included Fujitsu, Rolls-Royce, the British Nuclear Group, Nestle, Ericsson, Mars, the Department of Health, the BBC, Lucent, Siemens Medical Solutions, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Bird & Bird.