Knowledge and knowledge workers

August 25, 2012 Editor 0

“ALTHOUGH the pace may differ, all [rich] economies are moving towards a knowledge based economy.” The OECD made this claim in 1996 and few disagree. The term “knowledge worker” can be traced to Peter Drucker and his 1959 book “The Landmarks of Tomorrow”. Half a century later people still find it difficult to define. It is sometimes offered as an opposite to manual labour: non-repetitive work that involves a degree of problem solving. Others have argued that every employee, no matter how menial his task, is to some degree a knowledge worker. This lack of clarity means that it is difficult to measure its effect on the economy. But everyone (perhaps with exception of Brian Eno, pictured, a musician who is rarely short of a new idea) seems to accept that knowledge is good for business.

 

“The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today’s society.”
Peter Drucker, management writer (1909–2005), Concept of the Corporation (1964)

“I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. The transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse.”
Brian Eno, musician, Wired magazine, January 1999

“Insight is not a light bulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.”
Malcolm Gladwell, writer (1963–), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005)

“The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.”
William Hazlitt, writer (1778–1830), On the Ignorance of the Learned 

“A specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less.”
William James Mayo (1861–1939), quoted in Reader’s Digest, November 1927

“If you want to be a leader, you’ve got to be a reader.”
David Noebel, religious leader and writer (1937–)

“The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.”
Ronald Reagan, American president (1911–2004)

“Don’t be afraid to take time to learn. It’s good to work for other people. I worked for others for 20 years. They paid me to learn.”
Vera Wang, fashion designer (1949–)

Taken from The Economist‘s “Book of Business Quotations”

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Categories: The Economist

Tags: Brian Eno, economy, knowledge worker, peter drucker, writer