1. ROGER L. MARTIN
Knowledge workers should not be managed as
they were manual new approach can boost
efficiency and productivity.
Submitted By: Aasma younas khan
Submitted To: Respected Sir Yaseen
Date of Submission: 26-Nov-2013
UOW
2013
[TYPE
THE COMPANY ADDRESS]

2. Knowledge workers should not be managed as if they were manual workers.
A new approach can boost efficiency and productivity.
This article is published by Roger L.Martin who is dean of the university of Toronto’s Rotman
school of management. In the half century since peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge
Workers” these employees have become not just an important part of the work force but the
dominant part. Companies everywhere compete to find the best talent in knowledge work and
often wind up with thousands of expensive employees who aren’t as productive as hoped. So
they lay off a huge number of them and soon after are out recruiting again. This binge-and-purge
cycle is highly destructive, writes the author: Aside from the human and social costs involved, it
is an extremely inefficient way to manage any resources, let alone knowledge workers. The
problem exists, he believes, because most companies misunderstand how knowledge work does
and doesn’t differ from manual work. They think they should structure the former like the
latter—with each worker doing the same job for a full shift. But they also assume that knowledge
is necessarily bundled with the workers—and is almost impossible to codify and transfer as one
could do with manual work.
The article basically describe the performance of the knowledge workers in the two main
factories the decision factory and the product factory. In the decision factory the knowledge
workers do not manufacture products or perform basic services rather they work as the
production decision , the decision about what to sell, at what price, to whom with what
advertising strategy, through what logistics systems, in what location and with what staffing
levels. They make lots of presentations full of analyses and recommendations. That is the reason
that companies in the latter half of the 20th century spent ever greater amounts on R&D
departments. Whereas in the product factories the advancement of the knowledge does not stop
with a heuristic. In large scale manufacturing and service operations the culture is to keep
pushing until the knowledge becomes an algorithm, which is a formula to success. Less
experienced managers can use the algorithm to get the job done. In the decision factories
knowledge challenge is simply tougher.
There are the two critical drivers of productivity in any production process. The first one is the
way the work is structured and the company’s ability to capture the lesson of experience. These
drivers are interdependent means your work structure will definitely influence your ability of
learning.

3. Work
Structure
Ability of
learning
The trouble is that knowledge work comes primarily in the form of projects, not routine daily
tasks, so these employees often have downtime. Of course it’s not in their interest to advertise
any spare capacity—that could lead to a poor performance review or even a layoff—and this
survival imperative gets in the way of knowledge transfer. The solution is to structure knowledge
work the way professional services firms do—with capabilities flowing to the projects that need
them—and to put key executives in charge of codifying knowledge.