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What Peter Drucker Saw in Your Future

Knowledge Workers Seen as Key Players in Today’s Marketplace
Outcomes, Mar/Apr 2007

Forty years ago, Peter Drucker saw you sitting at your desk. At that time, he saw an economy heavily dependent on employees doing manual work. But in his mind's eye he saw a future economy built on people who used information to create value. Below are some excerpts of his thoughts on this significant development:

Finally, these new industries differ from the traditional 'modern' industry in that they will employ predominantly knowledge workers rather than manual workers.
—Peter Drucker in The Age of Discontinuity (1969)

Every knowledge worker in a modern organization is an "executive" if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results.
—Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive (1966)

Drucker saw that education and development, and to some degree training, would be the central concern of a knowledge society: "Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose. Converting data into information thus requires knowledge. And knowledge, by definition, is specialized."

Below are four key concepts that can help you develop as a knowledge worker:

1. Your work is different as a knowledge worker.

Every day, you choose to learn, to access knowledge. Many definitions and theories swirl around the term "knowledge worker." For the purposes of this article, we will define such people as those who: "are continually learning, aware that knowledge has a limited shelf life.' —Verna Allee, 12 Principles of Knowledge Management.

Drucker saw the knowledge worker's responsibilities as unique: "The more knowledge-based an institution becomes, the more it depends on the willingness of individuals to take responsibility for contribution to the whole, for understanding the objectives, the values, the performance of the whole, and for making themselves understood by the other professionals, the other knowledge people in the organization" The New Realities (1989).

According to Western Management Consultants, some of the key characteristics of knowledge workers are:

• Problem solvers vs. production workers
• Those who earn a living through intellectual rather than manual skills
• People who require a high level of autonomy
• Manipulators of symbols, paid for the quality of work rather than the speed of work
• Those who use unique processes
• Workers who possess un-codified knowledge which is difficult to duplicate
• People who deepen their knowledge and information by using existing knowledge and information.