Who Are the True Knowledge Workers?

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The term “high level” has always made me bristle because of its implications about manual work. Drucker’s thesis, perhaps inadvertently, reinforced a 20th-century predisposition that manual work comprises mostly low-level, repetitive tasks that require only eyes and hands. Problem-solving, creativity, and innovation were in the domain of someone with a college degree.

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Published: Monday, August 21, 2023 – 12:03

In his 1959 book The Landmarks of Tomorrow (latest edition Routledge, 1996), Drucker defined knowledge workers as “high-level workers who apply theoretical and analytical knowledge, acquired through formal training, to develop products and services.”

Lean

Who Are the True Knowledge Workers?

Hint: It’s not just the people with degrees and belts

Managers that get this see everyone as a knowledge worker, not just the people whose work is information- rather than material-related, and not just the people with degrees and belts. Everybody who is engaged in continuous improvement has a professional challenge to remove problems and improve the work.

This perspective was well-ensconced in corporate policy by the time I joined the workforce—by Drucker’s definition, as a knowledge worker—as an assistant manager in a marketing department. At the age of 23, knowing nothing about manufacturing, and located in an office building a half-mile from the factory, I began my “high-level” career. A moment of truth burned indelibly in my memory is my boss’s response when I asked about visiting the factory to learn about the company: “There’s nothing there to learn. It’s all cut and dry.”

In his 1969 The Age of Discontinuity (second edition Routledge, 1992), Drucker predicted that new industries would employ mostly knowledge workers, which in light of the explosion of all things digital was probably on the mark. Then, in 1999, in California Management Review, in an article titled “Knowledge Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge,” Drucker advised, “The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is… to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers…” similar to what had been done in the 20th century to the factory (the manual work.) Implicit in Drucker’s argument was that additional focus on manual work was relatively less important.

Years later, when my career journey landed me on that same factory floor, I learned first-hand who the real knowledge workers were: the people handling the product. My friend and mentor, Steve Spear, penned a short article in 2016, “The Face of a Real Knowledge Worker?” It made the same point: The people doing the work not only know the work better than anyone else, they also know the problems better than anyone else. This is true for every job—in the factory, the office, the warehouse, the OR, and at the checkout counter.

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Peter Drucker, celebrated by BusinessWeek magazine in 2005 as “the man who invented management,” is credited with a concept that has created confusion for me throughout my work life: the distinction between knowledge work and manual work.

Published Aug. 4, 2023, on the Old Lean Dude blog.