Probably the most important contribution of Peter Drucker to modern management is his study on knowledge workers.
For most of us, the term “knowledge worker” may just be a fancy term for “white collar professional”, people with specialized training tasked to use information for different goals. For example, an engineer uses a client’s requirements to design structures, and a doctor interprets the symptoms of a patient to find the best way to treat the disease. But as Drucker would point out in his writings, most companies do not understand that knowledge workers are fundamentally different from their blue collar counterparts.
Here is a small (and by no means exhaustive) list of things about knowledge workers:
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