As far back as 1959, Peter Drucker insisted on the need to pay more attention to knowledge work and the people doing such work. Some 40 years later, perhaps in frustration, he threw down the gauntlet to academics and practitioners alike with the claim that, when it comes to our understanding of knowledge-worker productivity, “we are in the year 2000 roughly where we were in the year 1900 in terms of [understanding how to improve] the productivity of the manual worker.”1 Knowledge work thus far has had no Frederick Taylor or Henry Ford; at best, the subject has been explored by approximations of William Morris and the Italian Futurists (artists who expressed an understanding of industrial developments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) — such as the architect Frank Gehry, the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer and the design firm DEGW.

Most businesspeople today would agree with Drucker about the importance of knowledge work. They understand that it is at the heart of innovation, which is itself the key to long-term organizational sustainability and growth. It is also a major operational concern: If companies can enhance knowledge-worker productivity in this century anywhere near as much as they did with manual labor over the course of the last one (an increase of roughly 50 times), the payoffs will be astronomical. In the shorter term, recruiting and retaining the best knowledge workers are vital to organizational success. Finally, a focus on knowledge-worker performance is a way of uniting what are often separate tasks, such as strategic planning, organizational design and IT investment.

Given these facts, we have found the problem of knowledge-worker performance, as Robert Oppenheimer once said (for good or ill) about building the atom bomb, one that is too sweet to ignore. And in the spirit of the artists concerned with industrialism a century ago — but with an eye toward more scientific advances — we spent more than a year investigating the subject. (For an overview of our work, see “About the Research.”) Among other things, we learned that sweet problems are not always tractable. Truly sweet problems may require the creation of radically new concepts and tools before they can be solved.

And while we readily admit that we haven’t produced the intellectual equivalent of the atom bomb, we haven’t exactly bombed, either. The first part of this article can be read as a series of dispatches —