Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers, by Thomas H. Davenport. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005. 226 pages, $27.50 (hardcover)
✍ Scribed by Myungweon Choi; Wendy E. A. Ruona
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2007
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 54 KB
- Volume
- 18
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1044-8004
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In 1969, Peter Drucker said in his book The Age of Discontinuity that "to make knowledge work productive will be the great management task of this century, just as to make manual work productive was the great management task of the last century" (p. 290). People nowadays have become more familiar with the term knowledge work than when the guru used it. However, there is yet to be substantial advancement on how to make knowledge work productive, and in many cases we do not even attempt to make it productive.
Thomas Davenport, who has a long-standing reputation as an expert in knowledge management, extends his attention to knowledge work and starts to address how to make it productive in his latest book, Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers. In this book, he describes two typical ways of dealing with knowledge workers: HSPALTA, which means "hire smart people and leave them alone" (p. 39); or manage them with techniques designed for the Industrial Age. He defines knowledge workers as those who "have high degrees of expertise, education, or experience, and the primary purpose of their jobs involves the creation, distribution, or application of knowledge" (p. 10). Starting with this definition, he shows how knowledge workers differ from others, how they think and accomplish tasks, and what motivates them to perform better.