The most important contribution of "management" in the 20th century was to increase the productivity of manufacturing workers by as much as 50 times.
An equally important contribution that "management" can make in the 21st century is the need to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge work.
In the 20th century, a company's most valuable asset was its production equipment.
The most valuable asset of the 21st century will be their knowledge workers and their productivity.
First, let's look at today's situation.
The first person who ever worked as a manual worker and devoted himself to the study of manual labor was Taylor.
Productivity gains in the past stemmed from new tools, new methods, and new technologies, resulting from what economists call "capital" spheres of progress. Historically, there has been little progress in what economists call "labor" (ie, worker productivity). Historically, there have been only two ways to increase production, work harder, or work longer.
Nineteenth-century economists often disagreed about everything. But they all agree that there can be differences in skills but no differences in productivity among manual workers. Productivity doesn't make any difference, except for the distinction between industriousness and laziness, or strong and not strong. The concept of productivity did not exist before. It's still an external factor.
The productivity of manual workers began to increase within 10 years after Taylor began studying manual labor. All the economic and social progress of the 20th century can be said to depend entirely on it. The increase in the productivity of manual workers gave rise to what we today call a developed economy. There was no such thing before Taylor, all economies are the same, all untapped. Today's so-called untapped or "emerging" economies are economies that have not yet developed the productivity of their manual workers.
Principles of Manual Worker Productivity
Taylor's principle is surprisingly simple.
The first step in increasing the productivity of manual workers is to observe the work they perform and then analyze the sequence of movements step by step. The second step is to record the physical effort and time required for each movement. Unnecessary steps to be eliminated - Whenever the manual work is analyzed, there are many procedures that are not actually needed at all, but are considered indispensable. Second, the steps that really contribute to the completion of the product are researched so that they can be done in the simplest, easiest, fastest, and least physically and mentally taxing way. Arranging these actions in a logical order constitutes a "job". Finally, redesign the tools needed to complete these jobs.
It turns out that analyzing any job, no matter how many years it has been implemented, we will always find that some traditional tools are simply wrong for the job. In Taylor's first example, he found that a factory shovel used to shovel sand was completely wrong—the shovel was the wrong shape, the wrong size, and the handle was wrong. Even today, we can find that the traditional tools used by surgeons are not right.
Taylor's approach doesn't sound like a big deal—and so often does what works. In fact, it took Taylor 20 years of experimentation to develop this method.
Over the centuries, this method has undergone numerous changes, adjustments and improvements. These methods have also gone by various names over the past century. Taylor calls it "job analysis" and "job management." .
Taylor's ideas and methods were far-reaching, but it was precisely because of this that they were attacked at the time. Taylor's true insight into the nature of work contradicts the poets and philosophers' notion of the beauty of the ideal of work. The crowd chanted "skill," and Taylor pointed out that there is no such thing as skill in manual labor, that labor is nothing but simple and repetitive movements . What makes labor productive is knowledge, that is, putting together, organizing and performing simple, unskilled actions. In fact Taylor was a pioneer in applying knowledge to work.
This claim has angered labor unions. At that time, all the trade unions were based on the ecstatic skills of craftsmen, and because of their "special skills", they dominated all walks of life. Taylor even argued at the time that these workers should be paid by their productivity, that is, by the output of their labor, rather than by their inputs, such as hours worked. To this day, unions still slander this. Tyler's definition of work as a series of movements also displeased people who did not perform physical work, such as poets and philosophers. Tyler dispels the splendid illusions of this group of people about work, they can no longer sing work as "noble skill". Work is just a series of simple actions.
However, in the past 100 years, any method of increasing the productivity of manual workers has been attributed to the Taylor principle. No matter how much the various claims clamor to draw a line from Taylor, claiming that their approach is different from Taylor's, whether it's "job enlargement", "job enrichment" or "job rotation" is the application of Taylor's method to reduce worker fatigue and thereby increase productivity.
The best example is Deming's "Total Quality Management". What Deming did, as Taylor did, was to analyze and organize a piece of work. But about a decade after Taylor's death in 1940, Deming added a quality control process based on statistical theory. Finally, in the 1970s, Deming replaced Taylor's stopwatches and movies with CCTV and computer simulations. But Deming's quality-control analyst and Taylor's efficiency engineer are identical and operate in the same way.
"Scientific management" and subsequent "industrial engineering" are important trends of thought that started in the United States and swept the world, and their influence on the world is far greater than that of the U.S. Constitution and the federal system.
The Future of Manual Worker Productivity
Furthermore, as mentioned in this chapter, considerable knowledge jobs—including many that require advanced technology and theoretical underpinnings—still have human-operated sectors. And the productivity of these people still requires industrial engineering.
Even so, the most critical challenge is how to increase the productivity of knowledge workers ? Knowledge workers have quickly become the largest group in every developed country, and they already account for two-fifths of U.S. jobs. Smaller, but rapidly increasing, percentages in other developed countries. Ultimately, the economic prosperity and eventual survival of developed countries will increasingly depend on the productivity of these knowledge workers.
Known knowledge worker productivity
6 main factors, determine the productivity of knowledge workers.
One, "What is the task?"
Two, knowledge workers must manage their own productivity while being autonomous.
3. Continuous innovation must be part of the work, tasks and responsibilities of knowledge workers.
4. Continuous learning and continuous teaching.
5. It is not only a matter of quantity, but also of quality.
6. Knowledge workers must be seen as an asset rather than a cost, and knowledge workers must be willing to work for the organization when other opportunities exist.
All of the above requirements, except perhaps the last one, are the opposite of how to increase the productivity of manual workers.
For example, for manual work, quality is of course also important, there must be quality standards, and poor quality is a disadvantage. Total quality management, applying statistical theory, is designed to reduce output below minimum quality standards.
For most knowledge work, however, quality is not just the most basic or limiting condition. Quality is the point and essence of output. To judge a teacher's performance, we don't ask how many students there can be in his class, we ask how many students have learned, which is a question of quality. To assess the performance of a medical laboratory, it doesn't matter how many tests it does, what matters is how accurate and reliable those tests are. Even the data room personnel responsible for classifying and filing records should do so.
Therefore, the productivity of knowledge work, first and foremost, focuses on obtaining the best quality, even the most amazing quality, and only when the best quality is obtained, it makes sense for us to ask "how much output of these work".
This means that we need to look at improving the productivity of knowledge workers in terms of quality, not quantity, which means we need to learn how to define quality.
What is the mission?
The first question that matters most to knowledge worker productivity is "What is the task?" This is also the question most at odds with manual worker productivity. For manual workers, the main question has always been "how should this work be done". In manual work, the task has been clearly explained. People who study manual productivity don't have to ask the manual worker "what should be done", their only question is, the manual worker "what is the best way to do it".
But for knowledge work, the key question is: "What is the task ?"
One reason is that knowledge work is not the same as physical work. Knowledge work does not teach workers how to operate step by step. A worker on a car assembly line knows to put a wheel on as soon as he sees a chassis and a wheel arrives on the line at the same time.
But in knowledge work, when a job is performed, the worker is not told the correct steps for the job.
An emergency in a hospital, such as a sudden coma of a patient, will of course dictate what a nurse should do at the time. But beyond that, it's mostly up to the nurse to decide whether to spend time filling out the paperwork or taking time to care for the patient. Engineers often have to step away from assignments to write a report, attend a meeting, and so on. Marketers in department stores need to serve customers and showcase products that customers love. But marketers often spend a lot of time doing paperwork, or checking inventory, checking delivery times, and so on. These things distract the marketer from serving the customer and do nothing for his productivity.
The first requirement for knowledge work is to find out "what is the task" so that knowledge workers can focus on that task. Do everything possible to rule out factors that interfere with his performance of this task. But this needs to be defined by the knowledge worker himself. What is his task? or what should it be? Only knowledge workers themselves can do this.
Therefore, research on knowledge worker productivity starts by asking the knowledge workers themselves: 'What is your task? what should it be? How do you think you can contribute? What obstacles should you remove from your mission? "
Asking these questions, and taking action, often doubles productivity with immediate results.
When asking nurses in a large hospital "what is your role", the answers clearly fall into two camps. One group said it was "caring for the patient" and another group said it was "serving the doctor". But the nurses agreed on one thing, and it was the so-called chores that reduced their productivity: paperwork, flower arrangements, taking calls from patients' families, etc. etc. Almost all of these chores can be handled by lower-paid non-nursing staff. Immediately, these nurses are twice as productive when measured by time spent with patients. Patient satisfaction also increases Twice as much. And the ever-disastrous nurse turnover rate has disappeared in less than four months.
Once the task is defined, the next thing that needs to be faced, and must be faced by the knowledge workers themselves, are the following issues:
1. Knowledge workers must be responsible for their own contributions. in quality. In terms of output, time, and cost, the knowledge worker decides how he should be responsible. Knowledge workers need this autonomy, but it also means that responsibility comes with it.
Second, the work of knowledge workers should include continuous innovation.
3. Continuous learning and teaching must be part of the work. These issues have already been addressed in Chapter 3. But we still need to answer a key question, which is:
What is quality?
For certain areas of knowledge work (especially those requiring a high level of knowledge), we have already begun to assess quality. For example, the work of surgeons is evaluated at any time, and their colleagues evaluate each other at any time. In addition, the success rate of some difficult, high-risk steps can also be used as a criterion (survival rate of cardiac surgery patients) and so on. But at present, we rely mainly on subjective judgments, rather than objective measures to evaluate the field of knowledge work. The main difficulty is that there is little agreement between defining "what a task is" and "what a task should be".
The best examples I know of are American schools. American public schools are plagued with problems. However, in the nearby private schools, most of the children are well behaved and have good grades. There are countless reasons for such a huge difference, the main reason being that the missions of the two schools are different. Public schools define their mission as "helping the underprivileged". Church schools define their mission as "helping children who want to learn". So one is dominated by academic failure, the other is dominated by academic failure success to lead.
Also, a similar example is the R&D departments of two large pharmaceutical companies. Because the defined tasks are different, there are completely different results. One of them only pursues "don't fail", and therefore only continuously makes limited and predictable improvements to existing products and existing markets. The other pursues "breakthrough products" and is therefore constantly taking risks. From their own perspective, their top executives, or outside analysts, both pharmaceutical companies have been quite successful. But the way it works is different, so the productivity and researchers are also different.
To define quality in the domain of knowledge work, and to translate that definition into knowledge worker productivity, is to define tasks in general. Defining what is the result of a risky plan and action is often difficult and often controversial. So in fact we know what to do, but this problem is a new challenge for most organizations and most knowledge workers. Answering this question requires debate and dissent.
Knowledge workers as "assets"
From an economic point of view, the differences in productivity between manual workers and knowledge workers are all the more important. Economic theory and businesses in general treat manual labor as a cost. To be productive, however, knowledge workers must be viewed as "assets." Costs need to be controlled and reduced, and assets need to be increased.
When it comes to managing manual workers, high turnover is costly to companies. Ford did this because the turnover rate of workers was very high at the time, and it needed to hire 60,000 workers a year to keep 10,000, so labor costs were very high. Although Ford had to come up with this "best policy", everyone at the time believed that the high salary would greatly reduce the company's profits. Profits nearly doubled in the first year after the unexpected implementation. At $5 a day, hardly any workers leave. In fact, Ford quickly had a waiting list of job applicants.
Labor is considered an asset only when it comes to turnover rates, rehiring, training, etc. costs. In addition to this consideration, manual workers as a whole are still viewed as a cost. This is true even in Japan, which emphasizes lifetime employment. Over the years, most of all work has been manual work. Management, based on this experience, still assumes that, with the exception of a few highly skilled individuals, one worker is no different from another.
The field of knowledge work is quite different. Employees engaged in manual work, without the means of production. They often have experience, but that experience is only valuable where they work. These experiences are not transferable.
But knowledge workers have the means of production—their minds, which are great capital. Because knowledge workers have their own production tools, they can come and go as they please. Manual workers need work much more than work needs them. The needs of organizations for knowledge workers may not be higher than the needs of knowledge workers for organizations, but most of them are already a symbiotic, coexisting, and equal relationship with each other.
The job of management is to preserve the assets of the organization. What does it mean when the knowledge of an individual knowledge worker becomes a company's asset, and increasingly a major company's asset? What does it mean for the personnel system? How can we attract and retain the most productive knowledge workers? And how to increase their productivity and translate their increased productivity into performance capabilities within the company?
Technicians
So far, we have discussed the productivity of knowledge workers in knowledge work. But quite a few knowledge workers, who do not only knowledge work but also manual work, I call them technologists. This group includes some who apply the most advanced knowledge.
Neurosurgeons must spend a lot of time diagnosing a brain tumor before they can operate on it, which requires advanced expertise. During the operation, any unexpected situation also requires professional knowledge and judgment. Both are the highest knowledge. But the surgery itself is a physical job. These movements can be studied, organized, learned and practiced just like any physical work.
But among the technical staff, there are also many people whose work knowledge is not that important, although it is also critical to the work itself.
Today's computer data management personnel must know the order of letters. This is not an experience that can be obtained by doing and learning. Except for this small part of knowledge, the rest is manual work, but it is necessary for file processing personnel. Also absolutely essential knowledge.
Technicians are probably the largest group of knowledge workers, and probably the fastest-growing group at the same time. This group includes most health care workers: laboratory chemists, rehabilitators, light, ultrasound. Technicians such as MRI, also include dentists and all staff related to dentists, as well as car technicians and various repair and installation machines. In fact, these technicians can be seen as the successors of the skilled workers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Technicians are also the most practical and most long-term competitive advantage that developed countries can have.
When it comes to really advanced knowledge, no country can take the advantage of its universities as far ahead as Germany. Theoretical physicists, mathematicians, economists, etc., no longer have the distinction of "nationality", and any country can spend a fairly limited cost to train many talents with advanced knowledge. For example, even a poor country like India can train quite a few top doctors and top programmers. Similarly, the productivity of manual workers has no nationality, and every country can apply "scientific management" to train the same manual workers as advanced countries in a very short time. Only in the cultivation of technical personnel, developed countries can still enjoy a long-term competitive advantage.
The United States is the only country that has really taken advantage of this advantage. So far, community colleges in the US have brought this advantage. The purpose of community colleges is to train technicians. These technicians require theoretical knowledge as well as job skills. I am convinced that this is the real secret to the productivity of the American economy today.
The community college system is not found anywhere else in the world. The Japanese school system trains only those who specialize in physical work, or those who specialize in intellectual work. It was not until 2003 that Japan began to set up schools specialized in training technicians. Better known is the German apprenticeship system. It is one of the main reasons that make Germany the world's leading manufacturing powerhouse. But it has always focused on technique and neglected theoretical knowledge, so it is likely to become obsolete soon.
But other developed countries will soon catch up with the United States. Other emerging or third world countries may continue to lag decades behind. On the one hand, it is because of the high cost of education technicians, and on the other hand, because intellectuals in these countries still despise or even despise manual work.
Among developed countries, the United States is still the most advanced in this regard, and more and more manual work is carried out. will become technicians. To increase the productivity of knowledge workers, it is necessary to increase the productivity of technicians, so increase the productivity of technicians as the first priority.
More than 70 years ago, AT&T began working on technicians—the general mechanic who installs, repairs, and replaces telephones in homes or offices.
In the early 1920s, AT&T's technicians sent to customers had become a major cost center and a major source of customer complaints. It took AT&T about 5 years to realize that the job of these technicians is to keep customers happy, not to install, repair, and replace phones and phone lines.
Reorganization:
First of all, what is "satisfaction" is defined by the technicians themselves. The standard they set up is: no matter installing a new phone or adding a phone line, it must be completed within 48 hours after ordering. In terms of repairing the phone, if the notification is received before noon, it will be completed on the same day, otherwise it will be completed before noon the next day. Each service person actually participates in the discussion and decides: "Will one person set up the phone, replace the phone, and another person do the maintenance, or the same person will do all the work. Which is better?" "These technicians also need quite a bit of theoretical knowledge, so teach them that. They have to understand how the telephone works, how the switchboard works, how the whole telephone system works. These people are not qualified engineers or technicians with specialized skills, but they must have sufficient knowledge of electronics to diagnose unanticipated problems and be able to deal with them on the spot.
Then through the training method of scientific management, let them learn a correct and repeatable way of working. They have to decide for themselves how to add a phone to the entire system; what kind of phone and what kind of service is most appropriate for a particular home or office. Therefore, in addition to mechanics, they are also trained as marketers.
Finally, the telephone company faced the question of "how to define quality." Technicians cannot be supervised outside. Therefore, he must define his own quality and provide high-quality service. It took f&T several more years to find out. Initially, the phone company thought it meant that supervisors were going to make a surprise inspection of the quality of the work. It was soon discovered that this approach was wrong, and both technicians and customers complained. Later, the phone company defined quality as "no complaints" -- only to find that only particularly dissatisfied customers complained. Later, the company redefines quality as "customer satisfaction". In the end, the waiter controls the quality himself. He must call the customer after a month or 10 days to ask if they are satisfied with the work they have done, or whether they have Other places that need better service.
The reason I go to great lengths to describe this early example is because it illustrates the three elements that can improve the productivity of knowledge workers and manual workers at the same time.
1. First, we can see the answer to "what is the task". In the case of AT&T, that is: "Satisfied Customers".
Second, technicians should take full responsibility for providing services that satisfy customers, that is, provide quality. This highlights what formal knowledge a technician needs. When technicians are fully equipped with this knowledge - and only then, can we improve the productivity of other parts of the labor force.
3. Most importantly, the example shows that technicians need to be treated like knowledge workers. No matter how important the physical part of the job may be, and likely to account for the most of their working time, the focus remains on making technicians knowledgeable, responsible, and productive, just like knowledge workers.
Knowledge work becomes a system
The productivity of knowledge workers must depend on the work itself being reorganized as part of a system.
For example, repairing large and expensive excavators. Maintenance work and the production and sales of machines have always been separate and separate. But Caterpillar, the world's maker of excavators, asks the question: "What do customers want us to do when they pay us?" The answer isn't the machine, but the features the machine can provide those customers. This means that the machine needs to work at all times. Because even an hour of idleness on the machine could cost customers more money than they would have spent on the machine. In other words, if asked: "What is our business?" the answer is "service". This realization has led to a series of reorganizations going back to the factory itself to ensure that customers' machines continue to operate, or receive immediate repairs and replacements. And the technicians who go to repair on behalf of the company have become the real decision makers.
another example. 25 orthopaedic surgeons, formed a "system" to provide the highest quality work: the best use of limited operating room, recovery room, and knowledge workers, so that the whole and each member can continue to learn, Continue to innovate and reduce costs.
Each doctor still maintains his own business, responsible for acquiring and treating patients. In the past, every doctor liked to schedule the operation in the early morning, so the operating room was idle for most of the day. The team now schedules the entire operation with the whole team in mind, so the operating room can now use up to 10 hours a day. This group also decides on a uniform standard for tools, buying in bulk, so you can get the best quality and lowest price.
Finally, they also bring in the concept of quality control. Every 3 months, 3 different doctors, began to scrutinize each member's surgery: assessing surgery and post-operative care. They then carefully discuss their performance with each doctor who performed the surgery, suggesting areas for improvement. Physicians who have unreasonable expectations for their work are advised to leave. Every year these committees have to revisit the standards of quality and raise them substantially. As a result, the team is now doing 4 times as much work as before. Costs have been reduced by 50%, half from reduced operating room waste and half from unified tooling. There were significant improvements in measurable areas, such as knee or shoulder surgical success, or sports injury recovery.
In this way, we generally know how to increase the productivity of knowledge work and how to execute it.
Where to start?
Improving the productivity of knowledge work requires a fundamental change in attitude. Not just for individual knowledge workers, but for the entire organization. So it needs to be tested. The first step is to find an area in the organization, or a group of people who are willing to change.
For example, the orthopaedic surgeons described above, first tested their concept by four doctors (one older and three younger) who had always advocated rapid change. It then requires persistence, patience, in a relatively small area, in a small group, for a considerable undisturbed period of time. Because even if the initial attempt is enthusiastic, it will inevitably encounter all kinds of unexpected problems. Only after the productivity of this group of knowledge workers has increased substantially will the new way of doing things be carried over to a larger area, or even an entire organization. By then we already know where the main problems are and where they will be hindered. Or what changes are required in tasks, organization, assessments, attitudes to be fully effective. If you omit the testing phase because of stress, it just means that mistakes are made public and successes are not mentioned. This means that the entire company suffers losses. But if properly tested, we can already make a lot of improvements in the process and quickly improve the productivity of knowledge workers.
Improving the productivity of knowledge workers is the greatest challenge of management in the 21st century . In developed countries, it is necessary for survival. In addition, developed countries cannot preserve themselves, let alone hope to maintain their leadership and standard of living.
Over the past 100 years, the leadership of the developed world has been largely determined by the productivity of manual workers. In today's developed countries, the young working population is rapidly declining. But the population of this class is still growing rapidly in emerging and developing countries. For at least the next three or four years, the only competitive advantage of developed countries is to rely on many well-trained and educated people to do knowledge work. At this point, in the next few years, developed countries will still have advantages in terms of quality and quantity. But whether such advantages translate into practical results depends on whether the developed countries and the industries within them, and the capabilities of each firm within them, can increase at the rate they have increased the productivity of manual workers over the past 100 years. Productivity of knowledge workers.
Economic leadership on the world stage will shift to those countries that can most systematically increase the productivity of knowledge work.
Management
of a company What does knowledge workers, the productivity of knowledge workers, mean for managing a company? What does it mean for the future and the structure of the economic system?
In the past 10 to 15 years, pension funds and other corporate investment institutions have become the largest holders of shares in U.S. listed companies. Because of the rise of pension funds and mutual funds, power has also shifted to new holders. The issue of how companies should be governed in developed countries has sparked a series of heated debates in the United States.
The existence of an economic organization, its purpose, and its management, are also discussed in all developed countries.
Soon, we will face the problem of management again. We need to redefine the purpose of the company. It must satisfy the interests of shareholders. At the same time, it has to meet the demands of knowledge workers in the company. Any organization that wants to be sustainable must see whether its knowledge workers have a productivity advantage. Therefore, attracting and retaining the best knowledge workers is the most important and fundamental task.
However, is all this measurable? Or is it purely intangible? This is of course an important question for management, inventors and capital markets. What does "capitalism" mean when the future is ruled by knowledge, not money? What does "free market" mean when knowledge workers become the real assets of the company? These workers cannot be bought, nor can they be sold. They cannot come from mergers and acquisitions. In fact, although they have the greatest "value", they are not like traditional "assets" that can be bought and sold, which means they have no "market value".
Answering these questions is beyond the scope of this book and beyond my personal ability. . But what is certain is that the emergence of knowledge work and knowledge worker productivity will bring about fundamental changes in the structure and nature of the economic system in the coming decades.
Workers need to learn to "manage and manage themselves", they must know how to put themselves where they can make the most contributions, and learn to give full play to their strengths. In your working life, learn to keep your mind sharp and active, and when to change what you do and how to change it.
We live in a time of dramatic change, and the average lifespan of a successful company is only 30 years at most. But a modern knowledge worker can continue to work until around age 75 after officially retiring; thus, even if a knowledge worker has delayed entering the workforce - spending a considerable amount of time educated until he earns a diploma in his 20s , still has nearly 50 years of working life. Knowledge workers are likely to have longer careers than the companies that employ them. Knowledge workers must therefore be prepared: they may not have only one job, not only one task.