Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
As mentioned in the previous post, Deming influenced a number of 21st century management techniques. Most of them have already ascended to buzzword status like “Six Sigma” and “Total Quality Management (TQM)” and should be familiar to those working in corporations and bibiliophiles browsing books in local specialty bookstores.
Instead of enumerating and discussing all of those approaches to management, I’ll just give an overview on the management technique that encompasses most of them: Lean.
From Peter Drucker’s essay Focus on Contribution
Knowledge workers in an organization do not have good human relations because they have a “talent for people.” They have good human relations because they focus on contribution in their own work and in their relationships with others. As a result, their relationships are productive–and this is the only valid definition of “good human relations.” Warm feelings and pleasant words are meaningless, and indeed a false front for wretched attitudes, if there is no achievement in what is, after all, a work-focused and task-focused relationship. On the other hand, and occasional rough word will not disturb a relationship that produces results and accomplishments for all concerned.
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:
Continue reading “The Knowledge Worker”