OVERVIEW

Knowledge Workers, Productivity, and Leaders   

To understand the environment for any search, consider the following. From the dawn of time to the present day 106 billion human beings have lived on earth. To reach our present level of civilization, the human race has had to process the same number of bits of information as we will be able to process, by electronic means, during the next ten years or so. The effect of this almost inconceivable expansion in our computational ability is probably the single most important fact of our time. The people responsible for this information explosion are called knowledge workers.

Technology has become an integral part of work life because of knowledge workers.The causes for its growth are more computer power, communications bandwidth, and increasing storage capacity at ever-reducing unit costs. As the price and performance of applied technology improves and grows exponentially, information technology and the effective leadership of information resources become all the more crucial to improving productivity. But, for many important reasons, knowledge workers cannot be managed into information cultures, they must be led.

Information cultures require new types of executives. In the functional hierarchy of the industrial economy, patterned after 19th century military organizations, managers were bosses and exercised formal control over everybody else as subordinates. However, in networked organizations, knowledge workers really are the bosses while managers support them as planners and coordinators. In stark contrast to labor cultures, the modern measure of productivity -- optimum yields -- has become quality of output rather than quantity.

As a result, the critical factors in guiding knowledge worker productivity -- such things as attitudes, adequate information, work flow, job relationships and the design of jobs and teams -- really are people issues. For this reason, knowledge workers require executives with the leadership skills to guide them, and the technical skills to understand them, not simply the management skills to control them.