Was Newton any less a genius because he didn’t foresee quantum mechanics?

Tim, your post and the other comments are anything but convincing: the last quote you chose from Drucker is all about organizations and management, about how people have to associate with organizations to get anything done. That’s exactly what web workerhood is NOT about. Matt talks about what tools management will give workers. No, no, no. Web workerhood is about tools that workers choose, that percolate from bottom up not top down. And Matt points me at a blog post by Andrew that suggests the web might not exist if not for Drucker. The history of the web says otherwise.

I’m glad to have your feedback on these ideas — because you make it look exactly like a paradigm shift as described by Thomas Kuhn. Those who are fixed in the old paradigm deride the new one. They cannot understand it.

Andrew: individual vs. group-based productivity is not analogous to fishkeeping vs. Web 2.0. Check up on recent research that shows that group-based productivity can be higher when individuals dispense with old-time efficiency think. As far as using analogy or logic, you’re the one who jumped to the elephant analogy rather than making a cogent argument.

Cheers!

try to address the logic rather than the analogy - individual efficiency is not directly related to collaboration (your comparison, not mine). If you comment on tropical fishkeeping, am I to take this as your views on Web 2.0? No? That is what you did with Drucker
And as to the Knowledge Worker 2.0 concept - you, who argue for burst over busyness, should get the difference between knowledge-worker-as-records-management-process-worker (1.0) and knowledge-worker-as-enabler-and-collaborator (2.0) more than anyone. Exactly where is the difference not worth a point release? Like I said, address the logic. Happy to discuss.

Cheers, Andrew

Yes, Knowledge Work is about personal information management. That’s only half the picture. Knowledge Work is also about sharing knowledge and this has always been about group-based, collaborative, wisdom-of-crowds productivity. More recently, switched on knowledge managers and knowledge workers know that this can be facilitated through social computing.

This is the essence of Drucker. It’s not about time mangement, but how you create and share knowledge and how managers can give you appropriate tools to get the job done.

As Andrew Boyd points out, us webby-types owe a lot to Drucker.

M

The knowledge worker 2.0 article adds very little to the original knowledge worker article — certainly not enough to qualify for a version increment.

No one person or one set of ideas is “the whole elephant.” That’s the whole difference between web working and knowledge working.
Aloha, Anne

I think you’re confusing Drucker’s TQM-aware executive with knowledge worker 1.0 (individual productivity), and that with the concept of knowledge worker 2.0 (collaborative awareness) - see the wikipedia article on Knowledge Worker 2.0 for a comparison (Matt Hodgson helped to write it).

People can read a lot into Drucker - they are like the visually disabled of old and the elephant - they see “social responsibility in business” (the tail) and say “Drucker is long like a snake”, or “total quality management” (the side) and say “Drucker is like a leathery wall”, or “knowledge worker as the key” (the trunk) and say “Drucker is like a thick hose”. He is the whole elephant
Cheers, Andrew