The Role of a Manager in the Knowledge Era
In the knowledge era, the ability to access and leverage knowledge for competitive advantage is critical to corporate success. But knowledge is rarely concentrated at the top of organizations. There is still a need for top-down communication and direction but this must be balanced with knowledge flows from the bottom up and the outside in [...]
Are Managers Even Necessary?
Do knowledge workers need to be “managed?” Many will tell you no. This view says that if workers are smart enough to be “knowledge workers,” then they are smart enough to organize themselves. This thinking is also consistent with the view of networks as living organisms capable of self-organization. There are a few interesting examples [...]
Outsourcing and the Networked Business
Last night, I attended the Association for Strategic Planning’s meeting at Suffolk University. The guest was Amit S. Mukherjee, author of The Spider’s Strategy: Creating Networks to Avert Crisis, Create Change, and Really Get Ahead. Amit gave a great talk showing the history of productivity leaps in business (he made the case that weapons manufacturers [...]
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Are Workers a Cost or a Resource in Your Organization?
Businesspeople today are facing two simultaneous challenges: the current lackluster economy and the shift to the knowledge economy. The lackluster economy makes it tempting and often necessary to cut headcount. People are one of the major expenses in a business and are often seen as a cost as opposed to a resource. But success in [...]
How Many Workers Are Knowledge Workers?
The change in the American workforce has been evolving slowly over the past century. Over this time, the dominant jobs have shifted from materials extraction and processing to information processing. The trend was constant and consistent over the century for the primary and tertiary sectors. The secondary sector actually peaked at 50% in 1960 and [...]
What is a Knowledge Worker?
The reason orchestration has become an important management concept is the rise of the knowledge era and the knowledge worker. The essence of what knowledge workers do can be summed up in two words: they think. Here are a few more: They use their judgment. They apply their experience. They make decisions about what to [...]
Orchestration Is New Command and Control
In the tangible economy, mechanization and mass production drove huge productivity gains as manufactured goods replaced those made by hand. These efficiencies came through strict discipline. Managers could describe to their employees in great detail the smartest way to accomplish their work: “Take Part A, attach these two screws then join Part A to Part [...]
