It is by now an obvious statement that companies compete on the strengths of their knowledge workers – people who “think for a living” by applying convergent, divergent, and creative thinking skills. Yet, more than 50 years after Peter Drucker devised the term knowledge worker, it is quite disappointing to peer inside the operations of any large organization and see how little of their time knowledge workers actually spend on higher-order thinking tasks. Largely to blame is the approach their companies have taken in applying office technologies. Faced with the choice, as author Shoshana Zuboff put it, to either automate or informate, they have tended toward the former – transferring tasks from the hands of workers to machines, rather than endowing people with greater capacities and having them work symbiotically with technology.
What Knowledge Workers Stand to Gain from Automation
It’s going to facilitate your rise, not your demise.
June 19, 2015
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Accelerate your career with Harvard ManageMentor®. HBR Learning’s online leadership training helps you hone your skills with courses like Process Improvement. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. Access more than 40 courses trusted by Fortune 500 companies.
How to get things done—better.