Knowledge Workers : the wisdom of the Crowd?

No great company can expect to compete without a great stockpile of knowledge and, therefore, knowledge workers. Question: the more k-workers, the merrier, right? Answer: it depends.

The concept of the "knowledge-driven organization" is the strategic rallying flag for businesses bred amongst the Information Society. But that enthusiasm doesn't automatically translate from ambition to reality. Faced with the pressure of quarterly earnings reports, many companies can't decide whether the daunting task of becoming knowledge-driven is a "do" or a "die".

Yet most career hierarchies in an organization -- a.k.a., "success" ladders -- are marketed with the idea of "demonstrated expertise." This ought to mean that careers are the channel by which organizations actually apply the knowledge in residence. In turn, that ought to mean that organizations are already inherently knowledge-driven. If that's the case, today's idea of knowledge management being something new must indicate something that has heretofore been missing. So where's the gap, and why?

The reality is, careers are fundamentally about influence, not knowledge; and most careers are promoted on the basis of power; and typically the power is manifest in "productivity", not "skill", and productivity is measured in outputs, not inputs. Just as athleticism gets you on the team but not necessarily off the bench, for most players the primary key is to fit into a prescribed position -- which translates into measurable productivity good or bad. And as the authors of Mass Career Customization (Harvard Business School Press) describe it, the positions that typically matter in an organization's career tracks are management. Net: when it comes to career success in the organization, the way management itself is prescribed or defined will generally trump knowledge. This puts knowledge workers in the position of needing a strategy to make management repeatedly buy into their knowledge.

Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg, two executives of Deloitte, hit the issue from two directions in their book. One direction looks right at productivity through the lens of performance results associated with female executives. The distinctively superior results that the authors find there inspire the question of which female qualities are so naturally more productive. The implication is that innate qualities of women produce higher performance in the corporate ladder. But what evidence of these qualities makes the qualities explicit? Why would these same qualities generally drive corporate success, and can men practice them too?

At this point it's worth pointing out that most careers, really, are built on making one's decisions agreeable, not on intellectual athleticism -- but then again only smart women seem to have big corporate careers. The classic dilemma of these smart women has been, how smart is it to have a life outside of the company if we want a strong career inside the company?

Benko and Weisberg's discussion gives some answers to that, but it still leaves us (intentionally) with the idea that even for those workers with these better female qualities (one notable mention is about "multitasking" as a woman's talent) a corporate ladder is hostile territory, whereas a new and trademarked model -- a lattice -- will promote and keep more women (and likewise men) in a profile that drives business performance. Mass Career Customization (MCC) offers a way to make the important "career" qualities explicit and "tunable" like the different ranges of a graphical sound equalizer. The trick is to get the company to accept these tunings, or profiles, and the book is largely an explanation of how and why the company should.

The issue of knowledgeworkers intersecting organizational structure is the very singular topic of the Benko-Weisberg book. The issue amounts to more than one thing, but the most consistent thing it amounts to is a view of organizational structure managing knowledge workers as assets. One major reference used by the authors is (click here if you want it) the Deloitte Enterprise Value Matrix, and the book's major offering -- MCC and an alternative to the corporate ladder -- is given an ROI argument by being presented through a Deloitte-style framework.

A dispassionate reading of the Deloitte matrix reveals it to be an internal pipelining of assets from resource cost to strategic investment. But there is a story broader than the corporate boundary, which is the connection between the information society and the knowledge-driven organization, and the ecosystem that it generates around and through the company.

In this story, one plot-line is the following path of assumptions, which amounts to traversing the bottom, middle and top rungs of the ordinary hierarchical corporate model for workers' value:

But while the MCC framework promoted in the book finds an alternative to that pattern for the employee, there's an even bigger message for the company itself to draw from the book. As knowledgeworkers, we like to feel that we're selling our intrinsic value to the company, but companies have their own reasons for buying or not.

The bigger value framework posed by the book Mass Career Customization has terms of measurement different from productivity and from the Deloitte matrix, where the employee must determine how much value the employee can have to the company. Instead, as seen below, the key terms are about how the company can have value in the new ecosystem generated by the Supply of Employees, the Demand for Employees, and how they relate to the Information Society supplying them versus the Knowledge-driven Organization using them.

This is probably where the individual knowledge worker can start to really understand the company's motivation to support what the reviewers at Hill and Knowlton called "a career engagement that is adaptable to changing priorities over time."

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack