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The old model of management was formed to deal with a set
of circumstances that are very different from than the ones
organizations face today. Industrial workers were proliferating
at the turn of the last century. Many knew only craft or
home-based labor and were unfamiliar with working in large
organizations. Most of them were relatively uneducated;
many were motivated to work hard only by external pressure.
Employees were often in unions; managers were not. Industrial
work was not yet very productive and substantial analysis
and redesign was necessary to improve it. The concept of
"bureaucracy," formulated by the sociologist Max
Weber, was considered a positive attribute involving professionalism,
clear division of labor and work roles that were independent
of the individual.
Of course, knowledge workers are difficult to define, and
they are not all of a piece. All workers employ some knowledge
to do their jobs, so we must resort to classifying them
by the proportion of their time spent doing so. And there
are undoubtedly several different types of knowledge workers,
each requiring different work environments and leadership
approaches. One obvious distinction, for example, is between
knowledge creators and knowledge users. Knowledge creators
are workers who create innovative new ideas and approaches
for use by their organizations. This category might include
scientists in research and development organizations, particularly
innovative product development , process designers
and creative academicians.
Knowledge workers can also be distinguished by the types
of ideas with which they deal. While the scope and scale
of ideas undoubtedly represent a continuum, let's split
it into big ideas and small ones. Big ideas are those that
dramatically change people and organizations-ideas for new
products, services, business models and strategic directions.
"We should develop a computer with a point-and-click
operating system that's much easier to use than any other",
is an example of big idea knowledge, it was someone's thinking,
perhaps Steve Jobs's, at Apple Computer in the mid-1980s.
By definition, an organization can pursue relatively few
of these big ideas because they require a lot of time and
effort to implement. Then there are the small ideas. These
are minor improvements in what organizations produce or
how they work. "Let's put glass shelves in our refrigerators
so that customers can see through them into the back,"
is an example of the type of small ideas that happen every
day. Small ideas are analogous to quality management and
continuous process improvement; big ideas are analogous
to process innovation, the start-from-scratch, think-out-of-the-box
approach to change.
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