One, a quote I'd just read on Matt Mower's blog. During the Falklands war, Britain's task force commander, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse commented that

This war is not going to be like the last. My job is to adapt faster than the opposition.

Winning wars, perversely, has always been about learning quickly (as well as luck). The difference between Fieldhouse's mentality and the Fortress approach to knowledge is that everyone fighting in the Falklands had clear goals, and an incentive to share what they knew with fellow combatants.

Second, and less violent, was an example from one of the many property shows on TV here in England. A couple had ordered a kit house from Germany, and with it came a team of German builders. These builders were phenomenal: they worked long hours, they were efficient, they completed on time, and they even redid a wall of tiles (which their project manager said was one whole millimetre out) without complaint. What struck me most about these builders was that they didn't take any tea breaks. They just got on and did the job.

Xerox, the Eureka Project, the social life of information, tacit knowledge and the like make it easy to place a huge value on learning around the job. Quality results are possible without this sort of touchy-feely knowledge sharing. But a team/organisation/whatever has to know exactly what they're doing, and above all, they need to not be knowledge workers.