Measuring Knowledge Workers

Peter O Toole - Measuring Knowledge Workers

Hi friends. Now, I learned about Peter O Toole - Measuring Knowledge Workers. Which may be very helpful for me and also you. Measuring Knowledge Workers

"Tell me again, what is it that you unmistakably do for a living?" Asked my Dad for the umpteenth time. For an 80 year old who left school at 14 and worked until he was 75 with racehorses, he found it difficult to get to grips with how man like me spends his day and why any sane man would pay me to do it. At the end of the conversation, he remarked, exasperated, "that doesn't sound like work, it sounds like pinching money".

What I said. It is not the actual final outcome that the real about Peter O Toole. You check out this article for information on what you wish to know is Peter O Toole.

Peter O Toole

With attitudes like these is there any wonder that so many knowledge workers feel disillusioned in the work they do. As Lucy Kellaway pointed out in the Financial Times on May 11th 2008 in her record "Aim Low To Find Meaning In Work", she has found that there seems to be a farranging melancholia in the work place. Or at least with the population who read her newspaper.

It should not be like this. 40 years ago Peter Druker, the management sage, saw that we were entering a new age, an age of the knowledge worker. He said in the Harvard firm report November-December 1969 that the great management task of the late 20th century would be "to make knowledge work productive ........... Just as to make hand-operated work productive was the great management task of the last century".

So how thriving have we been. Clearly there has been some improve in knowledge workers productivity. We have seen the application of Taylorist techniques. In some areas this has been a success. For example call centres where the use of It systems combined with productivity measures has led to a whole new manufactures being created. There has been a massive growth in personal productivity software, such that we all now furnish our own documents to a level of a junior typist. We can add up a row of numbers as quick as an accounts clerk could do. Finally, we can all furnish presentations to bore our colleagues and customers at the click of a button using helpful templates.

There is an moving paradox here though. As the amount of what we used to call white-collar workers seem to rise inexorably what they seem to furnish does not. It is often difficult to see what they are unmistakably doing. Like me, in my Dad's eyes, are they working, or just pinching money?

Let's look at a concrete example, the line manager who drives a Toyota car, for instance. In the last 10 years his car will be significantly cheaper and significantly more reliable. The management facts he receives will probably cost a lot more and be less reliable. Surprisingly, productivity tools for knowledge workers have tended to make them less productive.

There are some factors that can be identified in this.

People have desktop tools that enable them to spend a lot of time processing data. We can now churn out position papers, background briefings and sales proposals that would have astounded our forbearers. That is until they unmistakably read them. Anybody who has recruited population will know what an eye-opener it can be when you ask candidates to provide a hand written page of A4 about why they want the position and consider themselves a convenient candidate. As man who is involved in constructing sales proposals, I dream of being a buyer and request my suppliers to clarify in one hand written page why they think they should get the firm and then request them to come and present this without using a particular PowerPoint slide.

People like to be busy. We make a displacement for the meaninglessness of our work, with the sheer volume of it. It is a sort of therapy on the company's time. Many population like to be busy at work, where you have a confident level of seniority and respect and where problems tend to be fairly easy to sort out and you can be seen as some sort of hero. This is in stark disagreement to home where none of these factors are true.

People like to be viewed as indispensable. Everybody knows in his or her heart of hearts that no one is indispensable. We are just small cogs in the wheel. Yet I often visit associates that if one or two population left the organisation the flow of facts would stop. They are the only population who have any insight of how the inter-locking spreadsheets that furnish everything from the final management accounts to task profitability fit together and work. The funny thing is that these population are normally quite junior in the organisation and do not seem to be behaving this way for the money.

The costs of producing facts in organisations are often hidden. No one unmistakably knows what it takes to furnish facts in the business. How many population have handled the final numbers and how much time have they spent in handling the data.

It may be that these productivity tools are unmistakably part of an clarify smokescreen. We assume that population want to know what the real situation of the firm is. We have to ask whether this is realistic. Organisations are political structures in which population naturally want to rehearsal power. One of the questions I all the time ask executives is whether they, or their organisation, unmistakably do want firm intelligence since it depends on a commitment to shared definitions, reliable and consistent measures and most importantly a willingness to base decisions on facts, not opinions dressed in numbers.

I hope you receive new knowledge about Peter O Toole. Where you'll be able to offer use in your life. And most significantly, your reaction is passed about Peter O Toole.