Greenspan's testimony today got me hinking some more about this whole issue of knowledge-worker productivity.

Some thoughts to chew on:

1. Recent numbers from the Fed indicate that the rate of increase in worker productivity, the economic indicator which is driving economic growth, is down for the first time in several years.
2. Today, in testimony before the Senate, Alan Greenspan noted that the transition of the American economy from an industrial-based economy to a knowledge-based economy is accelerating.
3. Greenspan also argued that the greatest long-term threat to the American economy may be the inability of the educational system to properly train enough knowledge workers to support economic growth.
4. Management guru Peter Drucker has argued that the greatest task facing our nation is learning how to increase knowledge worker productivity.
5. Drucker notes that the top-down management styles, and Taylorist approaches to efficiency which produced enormous gains in industrial productivity, actually damages knowledge-worker productivity.
6. If people like Greenspan and Drucker are right in assuming that knowledge is the ultimate form of capital, then isn’t discovering and circulating that knowledge efficiently the primary task facing businesses in the 21st century?
7. Shouldn’t a company’s “professional communicators” be leading these efforts?
8. What are the communication practices which will most efficiently utilize a company’s corporate knowledge and memory?
9. Does the story I told of lessons learned using an email list as a tool for helping solve the problems faced by a process/document development team suggest other practices which might expand the knowledge base upon which corporate growth may be built?




Sources: (1) Alan Greenspan. Senate Testimony. CNBC. 2/13/04.
(2) Peter Drucker. “Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge.” California Management Review. 41:2 (1999): 79-94.

Back in the saddle again. I was pleased to see today's New York Times had a major, front page article on the Musharraf pardon.
But I will get off my political rant, and return to the six factors that Drucker says determine knowledge worker productivity.

The fifth factor here is the question of quality. How do you measure the quality of the work I do as a writing professor. As Ira Shor has convincingly demonstrated, beginning in the eighties, the conservative political movement in the United States has attempted to wrest control from its knowledge workers in higher education with a series of attacks based upon the slogan that "Johnny can't read/or write." This attack has damaged the credibility of those of us working in the educational system, and has also led to a movement which wants to use "high-stakes testing" to measure educational outcomes at the secondary level. There are similar pressures at the university level to measure outcomes.

The concept of measuring outcomes is not a bad idea. The problem comes when people who aren't knowledge workers in the field define what the goal of the outcomes should be, and how the outcomes should be measured. And I'm not encouraged by what I see out there. Some universities are asking students to write timed essay tests, and then those essays are scored by a group of experts. There is a major problem with this approach, in that it fails to measure what students are actually taught in a composition class: to go through a series of steps, a process, where they come up with an idea, research it, organize their ideas, draft, get audience feedback, revise, proofread, edit and publish. The timed essay ignores this complex rhetorical process in favor of a measuring tool which measures only the ability to write a timed test.

There are better measuring tools. Asking students to keep a portfolio of work created throughout their college career, and then having groups of experts evaluate the portfolios for evidence of their growth as writers is a better measure. However, such a measurement process is time-consuming, expensive, and slow, as most any longitudinal measurement is. And I have yet to see a conservative politician (or a liberal one for that matter), who is willing to commit the financial resources to that kind of extensive sampling of our students, and the correlating and analysis of data to the performance of specific teachers.

But the pressure is there. And frankly, I want a discussion of what it exactly is we are expected to be teaching our students. But I want a discussion that goes beyond the rants of those who scream "teach them grammar," without understanding the complex nature of the task of writing instruction; those who simply believe that returning to the failed instructional methods of the past will solve all of our problems.

Its been a couple of days since I've had time to post to the blog. And what brings me back today is a touch of political anger. I'll return to my discussion of "knowledge worker" in a later post.

As you may have guessed, my politics veers to the left. That being said, I'm not one of these leftists who think that America can ignore its status as the worlds strongest economic and political power, and turn a blind eye to the world. There are "dark forces" out there, who if left alone, will use violence to impose their will on the rest of us. I suppose where I differ with the interventionists on the right, is my belief that one of the greatest threats to our freedom is one posed by the actions of large, multi-national corporations.

Having said that, today I'm going to vent at the so-called major Presidential candidates--all of them--from Bush, to Kerry, to Edwards, Clark and Dean.
Over the past day or so, the founding scientist of Pakistan's nuclear program has confessed, over Pakistani TV, that he transferred or attempted to transfer Pakistan's nuclear technology to Libya, North Korea and Iraq. Today, incredibly, President Musharaff, pardoned this scientist.

This act of terrorism poses a much greater potential threat to civilization than 9-11. If nuclear weapons are developed by terrorists, or terrorist nations, they will be in a position to impose their agenda on the world. Yet are Presidential Candidates our silent on this subject. President Bush has called President Musharaff a friend and ally in the war on terrorism.

Shame! The President and our presidential candidates should demand that President Musharaff immediately turn over this terrorist to an international agency, which should investigate exactly what technology was transferred, and to whom. If Pakistan refuses, then America and the world should isolate Pakistan, and impose the same type of international sanctions that were imposed upon Iraq!

In looking back at Friday's post, I wonder if a reader can connect that post to Drucker's contention that "autonomy" is a factor which determines knowledge-worker productivity. My concern with the word "autonomy," is that most people will make the jump from "autonomy" to its near synonym, "freedom," and with that jump, miss what I think is another part of the meaning of the word "autonomy." I'm thinking "empowered to work in an organization." It gets rid of the notion of "autonomy" as the lone woman working in her cubicle, the idea that "autonomy" is somehow related to isolation. My argument is this: we aren't truly empowered, we don't have autonomy, unless we have access to the corporate knowledge of our organization. Without it, autonomy becomes nothing more than something we give lip service to.

Drucker's third factor is "continuous innovation." What does continuous innovation mean to me as an educator, doing knowledge work in the university? It means that I am not merely transmitting a "fixed knowledge" from one generation to the next, a work that merely perpetuates the status quo. Rather, it means I see my task as teaching a process. To again use the very overused maxim, "you give a man a fish, you feed him once; you teach a man to fish, you feed him again and again." I teach process, and process is a dynamically evolving set of skills.

Having said that, I wouldn't necessarily agree with those who might say that, as a writing teacher, I teach a "contentless" subject. Besides the writing process, I teach the theory behind that process, and my students receive a solid foundation in rhetorical theory, and a little bit of the history of rhetoric.