How We Got Here and Where We're Going - History of Knowledge Work Productivity - DBR 074

I want to talk about the history of knowledge work productivity. And it's going to involve a lot of different names. It's going to involve the triumvirate, well, the quadrumvirate (that’s the real word), the Mount Rushmore.

 

Only through understanding what they were thinking about can we extend that thinking. Then we can work on knowledge work productivity. 

 

We'll go all the way back to the start of the 20th century.

 

We have Frederick Taylor studying “Scientific Management”, which is a study of work, not ‘management’ per se.

 

Then we've got Peter Drucker, and he's important because he was doing all the thinking around knowledge work and how that came about.

 

Stephen Covey taught us that we have to get our mindset right in order to be effective people. David Allen taught us how to use tools and stop using our brains for task and attention management.

 

I might bring in Cal Newport and Thomas Davenport and these different kinds of names, just because of the curiosity factor there. But anyway, Drucker, Covey, Taylor, David Allen,

 

This episode is about:

• What problem do businesspeople and managers (in particular) have to deal with
• Why is it an important problem
• What ways have we tried to deal with this previously
• What tools are at our disposal to try to solve it now
• Who is currently presenting solutions and what are they

The issue is that our economy, particularly our economic productivity, is changing. We have yet to fully understand how to react to that change.

 

Some history to give us perspective and hints on what to do.

• 20th century productivity growth
• Organizational structures - sociology (business structures were not theorized/engineered)
• Original organizational structures (government/church/military) were monarchy/hierarchy
• The notion of trade, business, and getting wealthy (via the “business” way)
• Apprentice -> employee -> growing organization -> modern business problems (management)
• Used to be everybody worked for the king, who distributed wealth and work

It needed to scale and be ‘optimized’, but was never engineered

• We don't know exactly how it works
• You got three blacksmiths. All of a sudden it's a managerial problem
• Most things cultural or sociological there isn't hard science - like business
• Atom bomb derived from theory and we ‘engineered’ a way to construct one. Same thing with NASA and the space program. Business really was not that way