In his book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Peter Drucker analyzed and discussed the new paradigms of management.

Although much of the discussion revolves around the perspective of the organization, these are my takeaways on how we can apply his teaching on our journey of being a knowledge worker.

The concepts of knowledge work and manual work and their differences are intuitive. Drucker also discussed another important concept called “The Technologists.” He defined the technologists as workers who do both knowledge work and manual work.

This group includes people who perform knowledge work as their primary task and apply knowledge of the highest order. The technologists make up the majority portion of the knowledge workers. This group is also the fastest-growing group which includes occupations such as laboratory technicians, surgeons and dentists, computer programmers, and so on.

When it comes to truly advanced knowledge, Drucker believed no single country has the monopoly anymore. Only in educating technologists can the developed country still have a meaningful competitive advantage. Besides being a big part of the modern labor pool, increasing the productivity of the technologists deserves a high priority within any organization.

But what are the elements for making the technologists more effective? Drucker outlined three considerations.

First, we must ourselves the key productivity question “What is the task?” For many technologists’ work, the answer is not always obvious. If we focus solely on making the manual work portion of the technologists a little faster, better, or cheaper, we might miss the essential objective. Instead, technologists should be asking the critical question of “Who are we trying to serve and why are we doing it?”

Second, after we are clear about our task and our audience, the technologists must take the full responsibility of delivering projects to fulfill the answers. The technologists will apply their knowledge to deliver the quality and the quantity required by the projects. And only then could the technologists can be effective in organizing the manual part of the work.

Finally, organizations must treat the technologists as knowledge workers, no matter how time-consuming the manual part of their work. The organization’s focus must be on making the technologists knowledgeable, responsible, and productive.

In his book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Peter Drucker analyzed and discussed the new paradigms of management.

Although much of the discussion revolves around the perspective of the organization, these are my takeaways on how we can apply his teaching on our journey of being a knowledge worker.

Drucker discussed the challenges of managing information in an enterprise. To run an organization that focuses on wealth creation, Drucker advocated that we must collect information about both the internal organization and the external environment. Information, as Drucker asserted, must be organized or they are still just data.

However, there is not only one right way to organize information. Every executive must decide what is the right way to organize information for their needs. Even though there is no one perfect way, Drucker did suggest three elements to look for when designing an information organizing methodology.

Key Event: The executive should decide what key events should be tracked by the information system. Drucker defined the key event as something the executive’s performance depends on and want to monitor closely.

Probability Theory: The executive should work with her team to determine what constitutes normal operational fluctuation and what are exceptional events. Applying the total quality management principles, we can leverage the probability theory to determine that is normal and what is outside the norm.

Threshold Phenomenon: The third element of information organizing methodology can help the executives connect the dots for their businesses. The threshold concept is especially helpful to the executives when a sequence of events becomes a “trend,” thus warranting the executive’s attention and potential actions.

To measure the effectiveness of an information organizing effort, Drucker suggested the ultimate test is the goal of “No Surprises.”

No information design will be perfect for all occasions, but it should serve the executives by minimizing the surprise element of the business. Before events become significant, the information system should have allowed the executive to analyze them, understand them, and take appropriate actions or make the adjustments.

In the end, Drucker advised the executives to learn two very important lessons. We need to “eliminate” data that do not pertain to the information we need, and we need to focus on the usage of information for “action.” The purpose of having information is not so much about the knowledge we can gain. It is all about being able to take the right action using the information.

In his book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Peter Drucker analyzed and discussed the new paradigms of management.

Although much of the discussion revolves around the perspective of the organization, these are my takeaways on how we can apply his teaching on our journey of being a knowledge worker.

[www.amazon.com/MANAGEMENT-CHALLENGES-Century-Peter-Drucker-ebook/dp/B000FC12PK/]

Drucker discussed the challenges of managing information in an enterprise. To run an organization that focuses on wealth creation, Drucker outlined four sets of diagnostic information the executive will need: Foundation Information, Productivity Information, Competence Information, and Resource Allocation Information.

But, these four kinds of information, as Drucker asserted, are internally focused and can only inform or direct tactics. For strategy and, ultimately, results, we need organized information about the environment in which we operate.

We must design strategy based on information about markets, customers and prospects, technology within the industry or outside, and worldwide finance and economy. All these kinds of information are about the outside world and may not be easily collected. Without the critical information about the environment, it can lead to something Drucker described as:

“A serious cause of business failure is the common assumption that conditions must be what we think they are or at least what we think they should be.”

Another word, executives need a system which includes information that makes executives question the above assumption. The system must lead us to ask the right questions and not just feed the information we expect.

For the knowledge workers, and especially for executives, information is our key resource. We use the information to create connections with other knowledge workers, with other organizations, and expanding our “networks.” Essentially, knowledge workers use information to enable themselves to do the work.

So how can knowledge workers decide what information they would need? Drucker suggested we ask ourselves two important questions.

#1 “What information do I owe to the person with whom I work and on whom I depend? In that form? And in what time frame?”

#2 “What information do I need myself? From whom? In what form? And in what time frame?”

The question of “what I owe” must come first because the answer will establish communications. Until we can establish that communication between us and our connections, there will be no information flow back to us.

The only person who can help us answer the question of “what I owe” is our network and the connections within the network. By asking this question, we must collaborate with our network in arriving at the answer. At the same time, we must think through question #2 and be ready to answer when the other person in our network ask question #1 from their perspective.

By purposely asking and honestly answering both questions, we can create a virtuous cycle where the answers from one question can feed into and even strengthen the other question. Furthermore, working through these two questions are not a one-time event. We must be asking and answering them iteratively as necessary because the world around us is always changing.

The changes around us mean we must always be challenging our assumptions about our information needs and cultivating our network through sharing of information.