Accounts

Knowledge-Worker Productivity:

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE

Peter F. Drucker

T

he most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20* century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21" century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers. The most valuable assets of a 20*-century company was its production equipment. The most valuable asset of a 2P'-century institution (whether business or nonbusiness) will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.

The Productivity of the Manual Worker

First, we must take a look at where we are. It was only a little over a hundred years ago that for the first time an educated person actually looked at manual work and manual workers, and then began to study both. The Greek poet Hesiod (eighth century B.C.) and the Roman poet Virgil (700 years later) sang about the work of the farmer. Theirs are still among the finest poems in any language, but neither the work they sang about nor their farmers bear even the most remote resemblance to reality, nor were they meant to have any. Neither Hesiod nor Virgil ever held a sickle in their hands, ever herded sheep, or even looked at the people who did either. When Karl Marx, 1900 years after Virgil, came to write about manual work and manual workers, he too never looked at either, nor had he ever as much as touched a machine. The first man to do both—that is, to work as a manual worker and then to study manual work—was Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915). Throughout history there have been steady advances in what we today call "productivity" (the term itself is barely fifty years old). They were the result

CALIFORNIA MANAGEMENT REVIEW VOL 41, NO. 2 WINTER 1999

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Knowledge-Worker Productivity:The Biggest Challenge

of new tools, new methods, and new technologies; they were advances in what...