Productive knowledge workers are fuelled by curiosity

THE great management guru Peter Drucker believed that the biggest management challenge of the 21st century is improving the productivity of knowledge workers. “Workers by brain” are relentlessly replacing “workers by hand” as the dynamos of the modern economy, he argued. Thus, the most valuable companies (Google, Microsoft and the rest) are almost all knowledge- rather than resource-intensive. Yet, we have little idea about how to make them happy and productive.

The average rate of productivity growth is significantly lower in post-industrial societies than it was in industrial societies. The bloated public sector employs ever more paper-shufflers. And productivity seems to be falling in the most important parts of the knowledge economy. Research productivity has declined sharply in software, agriculture and medicine, the average age of Nobel Prize winners has risen steadily and the size of the teams involved in science has increased.

How can we improve this dismal record? This question was at the heart of the 16th annual Peter Drucker conference which took place in Vienna (Drucker’s hometown) on Nov 14 and 15. The Drucker conference is now a fixture of the management-business calendar, and this one dealt with a particularly timely subject. The audience was surprisingly pessimistic about the status quo given that so many of them were middle-managers or above – and surprisingly enthusiastic about embracing radical solutions to our current malaise. Here are my (inevitably biased) conclusions from two days of discussion.