MIT Sloan Management Review

Human Resource Management and Industrial Relations, Leadership and Organizational Studies

 

Why Don’t We Know More About Knowledge?

By Michael Hammer, Dorothy Leonard and Thomas Davenport

July 15, 2004

More than 15 years ago, Peter Drucker heralded the beginning of the knowledge era. Since then, companies have made many attempts to leverage what they know and to increase their workers” productivity. To bring together vast amounts of explicit knowledge, they have invested large sums in content repositories; to help people track down others with tacit expertise, they have experimented with open offices, mobile technologies and online directories. Much of this has been a waste of resources. In fact, five years ago Drucker likened our current understanding of knowledge- worker productivity to our understanding of manual-labor productivity in 1900. Translation: We”ve got a long way to go.To reorient managers more fruitfully, SMR asked three leading management thinkers to explain what we”ve learned and how we can do better in the future. For Hammer, the focus should be not on the worker but on work processes and eliminating non-value-adding work. Leonard contends that companies should foster master-apprentice relationships to get the most out of their knowledge. And Davenport urges companies not just to experiment with ways of improving knowledge-worker productivity (as many already do), but to carefully measure the results of their experiments in order to learn what works and what doesn”t.

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More than 15 years ago, Peter Drucker heralded the beginning of the knowledge era. Since then, companies have made many attempts to leverage what they know and to increase their workers’ productivity. In order to bring together vast amounts of explicit knowledge, they have invested large sums in databases and content repositories; in order to help people track down others with tacit expertise, they have experimented with open offices, mobile technologies and online directories.

Some of this has helped; much of it has been a waste of resources. In fact, five years ago Drucker likened our understanding of knowledge-worker productivity today to our understanding of manual-labor productivity in 1900. Translation: We’ve got a long way to go.

To reorient managers more fruitfully, SMR asked three leading management thinkers to explain what we’ve learned and how we can do better in the future. Their contrarian responses bring clarity from a bird’s-eye view, while also suggesting ways to begin making progress on the ground.

Focus on the Process

In recent years, companies have tried a variety of approaches to resolving the supposed intractability of improved knowledge-worker productivity — from hiring chief knowledge officers to establishing knowledge-management programs. None of these efforts helped very much and most have now faded into obscurity.

But we should not despair. In fact, we actually know quite a lot about knowledge workers and their productivity. We... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

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