Will the real Drucker please step forward?

Anne Zelekna has been writing about knowledge work and Drucker — setting her web economy against the knowledge economy — in response to my comment (and others by Stephen Collins and Andrew Boyd) and my post on busy vs. burt mode work for knowledge workers.

In her new post, Anne takes Drucker head-on and defines the knowledge worker and web workers in the following ways:

Knowledge Worker (Drucker):

goes after individual productivity

cuts out unproductive uses of time [1]

focuses on time efficiency

Web Worker (Anne Z):

seeks group-based, collaborative, wisdom-of-crowds productivity

cuts out redundant information sources

seeks attention expansion

Is this view right? Is Drucker suggesting effective work and knowledge workers equate to productive time management?

The phrase knowledge economy evolved out of a necesity to overtly recognise that knowledge and information has a business value, that business needs to rely on it more and more in order to have a competitive advantage, and that executives, therefore, should give it adequate attention.

“A key concept of this sector of economic activity is that knowledge and education can be treated as:

• A business product, as educational and innovative intellectual products and services can be exported for a high value return.
• A productive asset “

- Wikipedia [2]

This premise largely grew from work by Peter Drucker in 1966 called The Effective Executive. In talking to executives through this book, Drucker suggests that “intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained”.

…but is this the real Drucker?

Drucker isn’t talking about knowledge management here – he’s talking about competitive edge from a business perspective. As Jørgen Larsen points out, Drucker is arguing that, in a knowledge economy, a competitive edge, a differentiator, is achieved by bringing new ideas to market faster, and that the knowledge worker is right at the centre of this effort.

Back in 1920, the ratio of manual workers to knowledge workers was around 2:1 [3] — a paradigm has obviously shifted in the last 80 years or so. Naisbitt [4] suggests that white-collar workers first outnumbered blue-collar workers around 1956 – a fact that Drucker acknowledged around this time. Drucker saw that work was becomming less about manual, process driven work, and was becomming more about assimilating information, creating knowledge, writing, analysing and advising other people (i.e. sharing knowledge) [5].

Throughout his life, Drucker wrote extensively regarding the nature of this way of working, its implications for executives, managers, management as a discipline, and its impact on workers. Ultimately, his wish was to enlighten those managers that Anne get’s annoyed with. While Anne dismisses Drucker as irrelevant to what she calls web workers, I think she would have liked his views had she read a bit more into his writings.

Drucker, like Anne, knew that the “most important thing we know is that work and working are fundamentally different phenomena” and that we must “develop new approaches, new principles, and new methods” to knowledge work [3]. His message to executives is to empower knowledge workers to do the work they need to in order to give organisations a competitive edge. This is because, today, the large knowledge organisation is the central reality. Even “modern society is really a society of large organised institutions. In every one of them, the center of gravity has shifted to the man who puts to work what he has between his ears rather than the brawn of his muscles or the skill of his hands” [1].

As Joe McKendrick of ZDnet writes, Drucker knew that information was becoming the new commodity, and it took motivated knowledge workers to wring value out of it for their organisations. Teamwork and cooperation — not command and control — would bring profits to the online organisation. In 1988, he predicted that in 2008 large organisations would have far fewer traditional managers that regulated the activities of other people. Instead, work would be done by those Anne calls Web Workers, brought together in task forces that cut across traditional departments.

To this end, Drucker’s credo was:

“Worker, manage thyself. Organisation, get out of the way”.

This is the real Drucker.

M

—-

[1] Drucker, P. 2004. The Daily Drucker

[2] Wikipedia. Knowledge Economy. Online at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_economy#Concepts>, accessed on 5 June 2007.

[3] Drucker P. 1973. Management. New York: Harper & Row.

[4] Naisbitt, J 1982. Megatrends. New York: Warner Books.

[5] Drucker, P. 1980. Managing in turbulent times. London: Heinemann.