At Google, we think business guru Peter Drucker well understood how to manage the new breed of "knowledge workers." After all, Drucker invented the term in 1959. He says knowledge workers believe they are paid to be effective, not to work 9 to 5, and that smart businesses will "strip away everything that gets in their knowledge workers' way." Those that succeed will attract the best performers, securing "the single biggest factor for competitive advantage in the next 25 years." Newsweek
This is from an article on Google's Ten Golden Rules. I don't like the sound of 'Hire by committee', but maybe this bullet point loses something in translation. The spiel beneath it runs, 'If you hire great people and involve them intensively in the hiring process, you'll get more great people' — and that I do warm to. ('Strive to reach a consensus' also sounds … dull, but read the words beneath the header and what we're perhaps talking about is building common purpose, a shared vision … I think … 'At Google, the role of the manager is that of an aggregator of viewpoints, not the dictator of decisions': err … yes, and no.) Other points that stand out for me: make coordination easy; eat your own dog food; encourage creativity; communicate effectively.
I want to read some Drucker:
"What motivates workers - especially knowledge workers - is what motivates volunteers. Volunteers, we know, have to get more satisfaction from their work than paid employees precisely because they do not get a pay check. They need, above all, challenge. They need to know the organization's mission and to believe in it. They need continuous training. They need to see results. Implicit in this is that employees have to be managed as associates, partners-and not in name only. The definition of a partnership is that all partners are equal."
"The productivity of the knowledge worker is still abysmally low. It has probably not improved in the past 100 or even 200 years-for the simple reason that nobody has worked at improving the productivity. All our work on productivity has been on the productivity of the manual worker…The way one maximizes their performance is by capitalizing on their strengths and their knowledge rather than trying to force them into molds."
(Quotations from the NHS National Electronic Library for Health — now that's interesting!)
There's clearly a lot to be learned from him and I am ashamed to think how I have managed many adults in the course of my work in education and yet, like most of my peers, never received anything but the most cursory induction into "management training":
In the amount and kind of formal knowledge required, knowledge work will differ tremendously. Some will have fairly low requirements, some will require the kind of knowledge the neurosurgeon has to possess. Even if the knowledge itself is quite primitive, it is knowledge that only formal education can provide. Filing is hardly advanced knowledge work. However, it is based on a knowledge of the alphabet or in Japan on a knowledge of Chinese ideographs which can be acquired only in and through systematic learning, that is, in and through formal schooling.
The first implication of this is that education will become the center of the knowledge society and schooling its key institution. What knowledge mix is required for everyone? What is quality in learning and teaching? All these will, of necessity, become central concerns of the knowledge society and central political issues. In fact, it may not be too fanciful to anticipate that the acquisition and distribution of formal knowledge will come to occupy the place in the politics of the knowledge society which acquisition and distribution of property and income have occupied in the two or three centuries which we have come to call the Age of Capitalism.
Paradoxically, this may not necessarily mean that the school as we know it will become more important. For, in the knowledge society, clearly more and more of knowledge, and especially of advanced knowledge, will be acquired well past the age of formal schooling, and increasingly, perhaps, in and through educational processes which do not center on the traditional school, e.g. systematic continuing education offered at the place of employment. But, at the same time, there is very little doubt that the performance of the schools and the basic values of the schools will increasingly become of concern to society as a whole, rather than be considered professional matters that can be left to the educator.
We can also predict with high probability that we will redefine what it means to be an educated person. Traditionally and especially during the last two hundred years at least in the West (and since about that time in Japan as well) an educated person was someone who shared a common stock of formal knowledge what the Germans called Allgemeine Bildung and the English ( and following them, the nineteenth- century Americans) called the liberal arts. Increasingly, an educated person, will be someone who has learned how to learn, and throughout his or her lifetime continues to learn, especially in and out of formal education. …
This society, in which knowledge workers dominate, is in danger of a new class conflict: the conflict between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of people who will make their living through traditional ways, either by manual work, whether skilled or unskilled, or by services work, whether skilled or unskilled. The productivity of knowledge work still abysmally low will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the competitive position of every country, industry and institution within society. The productivity of the non- knowledge services worker will increasingly become the social challenge to the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes and with them dignity and status to non-knowledge people.
No earlier society in history faced these challenges.
Equally new are the opportunities of the knowledge society. In the knowledge society, for the first time in history, access to leadership is open to all.
Equally, access to the acquisition of knowledge will no longer be dependent on obtaining a prescribed education at any given age. Learning will become the tool of the individual available to him or her at any age if only because so much of skill and knowledge can be acquired by means of the new learning technologies. …
Given what passes for "management training" in teaching, our lack of exposure to it is probably a very, very good thing. But I am beginning to realise what could be delivered under this tag.
There is a wealth of material, of ideas in Peter Drucker's 1994 Edwin L. Godkin Lecture — far too many to summarise here. This remark struck home for me, but will be elusive plucked from its context (so, again, read the original!): 'the shift from knowledge to knowledges offers tremendous opportunities to the individual. It makes possible a career as a knowledge worker'.
Footnote (that really is no such thing): management is knowledge work. Furthermore (and many times so): 'just as the essence of medicine is not the urine analysis, the essence of management is not technique or procedure. The essence of management is to make knowledges productive. Management, in other words, is a social function. And, in its practice, management is truly a liberal art' — Drucker.
