The Knowledge Worker: New Resources and New Challenges
It is not only that information has become the new form of capital—as well as a valuable product—it is also important to recognize that the work being done by employees is also shifting. We now live in the era of the knowledge worker. One third of the employees in Kao Co. (a Japanese firm), for instance, were “liberated” in the 1990s from routine and mundane jobs and reassigned to “rebuild the company every ten years” and “stay five years ahead of any competition.” These employees represented the future hope for this company. Financial reserves are no longer the answer for this company, nor the goal. The accumulation of knowledge not money is now the goal—for both the Kao executives and employees.
Similar changes have occurred over the past two decades in many high tech American firms:
“If innovation is . . . the basic tenet [at this high tech firm], then expertise that leads to technical and scientific innovation is [this organization’s] capital. The numerous patents for processes and applications are tangible assets. The intangible assets from which these come are the people: experts in their various disciplines.”
Young engineers in many high tech firms are recruited like professional athletes, and like these athletes soon become less valuable as they lose touch with the rapidly changing knowledge base that they acquired in college or graduate school. Physicians retain considerable respect and power in an East Coast suburban hospital, even though the hospital has been purchased by a major investment firm and is now being run in a more “businesslike” manner. The physicians, however, now have to compete with the fiscal expertise of this hospital’s new financial administrator and auditor. The head of a very successful law firm confides that:
“. . . the best lawyers are actually the largest threat to the firm and while this is well understood it is largely unspoken. [Our best lawyer] alone generates over $ 2 million in revenues each year and is a top producer of new business. This gives him the ability to “call the shots,” and while he does not abuse this power he has exercised it in some important ways.”
The new capital in these organizations and many other postmodern organizations—at least as defined by influence in the company and the ability to “call the shots”—isn’t determined by ownership of the company or even by one’s formal position in the company. Rather, it is determined by one’s possession of knowledge and skills that are relevant to the immediate needs of the organization. Peter Drucker was among the first to identify this major trend when he noted in 1968 that:[xxii]
“The ‘knowledge industries’ which produce and distribute ideas and information rather than goods and services, accounted in 1955 for one-quarter of the U.S. gross national product. This was already three times the proportion of the national product that the country had spent on the “knowledge sector” in 1900. Yet by 1965, ten years later, the knowledge sector was taking one-third of a much bigger national product. In the late 1970s it will account for one-half of the total national product. Every other dollar earned and spent in the American economy will be earned by producing and distributing ideas and information, and will be spent on procuring ideas and information.”
