Thinking for a Living Takes on Management of Knowledge Workers

Ever since the business school elevated the rather simple job of managing a workforce into a fake intellectual discipline, there has been an unfortunate emphasis on the quantifiable. In the bad old days of “time-and-motion” experts who measured how long it took Reg and Mick on the assembly line to turn their screws, quantifiable statistics made some sense. However, the US economy is down to 10% manufacturing in the broadest sense. Managing knowledge workers requires something else. Thinking for a Living by Thomas H. Davenport acknowledges this but fails to overcome the b-school nonsense about management.

Part of the problem stems from a misunderstanding of just what management is. Contrary to common belief, management is not leadership, nor is it bossing people about. Properly done, management provides the people who actually do the work with those resources necessary to do the work. And to a small degree, Dr. Davenport does see this. Where the work stumbles is in trying to give managers something beyond that to do anyway.

A more fundamental criticism is in the work's structure. If one is going to go to the trouble of actually writing a book about something, one ought to make a thorough work of it. Dr. Davenport succumbs to the “busy executive” nonsense and finishes each chapter with a “summary” and a set of “recommendations.” If what one has to say merits a book, giving the reader an “executive overview” is doing him a disservice by talking down to him and by denying him the access to one’s full argument that he may or may not accept. If everything can be squeezed into the summary and recommendations without a loss of detail or intellectual rigor, one wrote a piece for Barron’s or Business Week, not a book.

In the details, Dr. Davenport does come up with a few nuggets worthy of discussion and debate. For instance, research he cites illustrates that computer programmers with the biggest offices are the most productive. But is that because office size is a measure of status and that knowledge workers with high status in their companies produce more? Or is it because programming requires one to spread out masses of paper and the more room the better? Or are the mose productive programmers owners of small businesses who, by virtue of being owners, have bigger offices? And what does “productive” really mean? Is it more productive to create an unstable, kludge of software quickly and repeatedly, or is it more productive to generate an elegant and stable code that has varied applications if it takes a while? One might argue that Linus Torvald was more productive than Bill Gates because Linux is simply a more refined operating system than any version of Windows. But no one in B-school would think so.

The book can’t do any harm in the hands of a manager, which is not true of a lot of business books. Thinking for a Living will not spawn a fad like Total Quality Management (which implies that beforehand everyone was committed to Partial Quality Management) because it tries to tackle a subject that is inherently messy. The book might have provided more insight had it accepted the fact and been a bit messier itself.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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