knowledge worker

206 results back to index

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

As a result, the knowledge sector prefers to leave these processes unspecified, relying instead on the hyperactive hive mind workflow to informally organize their work. For sure, a major explanation for this process aversion is the insistence on knowledge worker autonomy that we explored earlier. Production processes, by definition, require rules about how work is coordinated. Rules reduce autonomy—creating friction with the belief that knowledge workers “must manage themselves,” as Peter Drucker commanded. This dislike of processes, however, goes beyond a general bias toward autonomy. There’s a belief, implicitly held by many knowledge workers, that the lack of processes in this sector is not just an unavoidable side effect of self-management, but actually a smart way to work.

…

Drucker argued this approach was doomed to fail in the new world of knowledge work, where productive output was created not by expensive equipment stamping out parts, but instead by cerebral workers applying specialized cognitive skills. Indeed, knowledge workers often knew more about their specialties than those who managed them. The best way to deploy these highly skilled individuals, Drucker concluded, was to give them clear objectives and then leave them alone to accomplish their brainy work however they saw fit. While it might have been efficient to tell an assembly line worker exactly how to install a steering wheel, it was futile to try to tell a marketing copywriter exactly how to brainstorm a new product slogan. Drucker preached this idea of knowledge worker autonomy throughout his long career.

…

Drucker preached this idea of knowledge worker autonomy throughout his long career. As late as 1999, he still emphasized its importance: [Knowledge work] demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.35 It’s hard to overestimate the influence of this idea. With the exception of some routinized bureaucratic processes, like filing expense reports, the intricacies of how the myriad demanding tasks that define modern office work are accomplished remain largely beyond the scope of management. They’re pushed instead into the hazy realm of personal productivity.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

The obvious peril in Era Three is more job loss. This time the potential victims are not tellers and tollbooth collectors, much less farmers and factory workers, but rather all those “knowledge workers” who assumed they were immune from job displacement by machines. People like the writers and readers of this book. Knowledge Workers’ Jobs Are at Risk The management consulting firm McKinsey thinks a lot about knowledge workers; they make up essentially 100 percent of its own ranks as well as its clientele. When its research arm, the McKinsey Global Institute, issued a report on the disruptive technologies that would most “transform life, business, and the global economy” in the next decade, it included the automation of knowledge work.

…

They might finally lead to that fifteen-hour workweek. But our belief is that they will—and should—follow the path blazed by spreadsheets. Instead of replacing knowledge workers, they should give them more to think about. Some decisions and actions may be taken by automated systems, but that should free up knowledge workers to accomplish larger and more important tasks. Of course, there is a downside to working as much as knowledge workers tend to (particularly in the United States) today. But there is perhaps an even greater downside to not working enough or at all. The price we have to pay for thinking expansively about work is never having enough time to do it all.

…

When its research arm, the McKinsey Global Institute, issued a report on the disruptive technologies that would most “transform life, business, and the global economy” in the next decade, it included the automation of knowledge work. Having studied typical job compositions in seven categories of knowledge workers (professionals, managers, engineers, scientists, teachers, analysts, and administrative support staff), McKinsey predicts dramatic change will have already taken hold by 2025. The bottom line: “we estimate that knowledge work automation tools and systems could take on tasks that would be equal to the output of 110 million to 140 million full-time equivalents (FTEs).”3 Since we’ll continue to use the term “knowledge workers” quite a bit, we should pause to define who these people are. In Tom’s 2005 book, Thinking for a Living, he described them as workers “whose primary tasks involve the manipulation of knowledge and information.”4 Under that definition, they represent a quarter to a half of all workers in advanced economies (depending on the country, the definition, and the statistics you prefer), and they “pull the plow of economic progress,” as Tom put it then.

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom Demarco

Brownian motion, delayed gratification, Frederick Winslow Taylor, interchangeable parts, knowledge worker, new economy, risk tolerance, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, The Soul of a New Machine, Yogi Berra

In my experience, there is never less than a 15 percent penalty due to time-sharing a knowledge worker between two or more tasks. Moving a person who had been assigned to a single job to work part-time on a second exposes you to a loss of at least six hours per week of that person’s time. And the penalty is greater when the partitioning is greater. I limit this statement to knowledge workers, since manual and blue-collar workers may not be affected, or may be less affected, by some of the components of the task-switching penalty. For knowledge workers, though, the minimum penalty is 15 percent. The only method I have used so far to substantiate the 15 percent minimum penalty is a time-honored approach called proof by repeated assertion.

…

Part Four Risk taking and risk management: Why running away from risk is a no-win strategy, and why running toward it makes sense when managed sensibly (and what that entails). Slack is directed toward management at all levels in knowledge organizations and other modern corporations where knowledge workers predominate. It is also directed to the knowledge workers themselves. It’s directed toward you if you sense that there is something terribly wrong in the infernal busyness of the modern workplace, if you know in your heart that the slack that has been squeezed out of your organizations over the last ten years now has to be reintroduced, or no further meaningful progress will ever be possible.

…

Growth is essential to Eve, as essential as her paycheck. You can no more expect her to work without meaningful challenge than you could expect her to work without salary. The nearly equal status of challenge and pay is unique to knowledge workers. They are different from the blue-collar workers that our fathers managed a generation ago. The easy, dumb error of managing knowledge workers is to forget that they are different and assume that basic rules developed on factory floors a century ago apply to them. The Nonprofit Model I had occasion recently to manage a small not-for-profit organization where most of the work was done by volunteers.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

The ubiquity of deep work among influential individuals is important to emphasize because it stands in sharp contrast to the behavior of most modern knowledge workers—a group that’s rapidly forgetting the value of going deep. The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools. This is a broad category that captures communication services like e-mail and SMS, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and the shiny tangle of infotainment sites like BuzzFeed and Reddit. In aggregate, the rise of these tools, combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and networked office computers, has fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention into slivers.

…

In aggregate, the rise of these tools, combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and networked office computers, has fragmented most knowledge workers’ attention into slivers. A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone. This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking. At the same time, however, modern knowledge workers are not loafing. In fact, they report that they are as busy as ever. What explains the discrepancy? A lot can be explained by another type of effort, which provides a counterpart to the idea of deep work: Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted.

…

Benn needed to learn a hard skill, and needed to do so fast. It’s here that Benn ran into the same problem that holds back many knowledge workers from navigating into more explosive career trajectories. Learning something complex like computer programming requires intense uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding concepts—the type of concentration that drove Carl Jung to the woods surrounding Lake Zurich. This task, in other words, is an act of deep work. Most knowledge workers, however, as I argued earlier in this introduction, have lost their ability to perform deep work. Benn was no exception to this trend.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

Smokestack industries had given way to California’s Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Boston. Working-class occupations were in decline as a larger share of the workforce joined the burgeoning ranks of knowledge workers. Peter Drucker, a leading management guru, wrote of another power shift from the owners and managers of capital to knowledge workers, as the prosperity of individuals, companies, and nations came to depend on the application of knowledge. Knowledge workers were gaining the upper hand because “the firm’s most valuable knowledge capital tends to reside in the brains of its key workers, and ownership of people went out with the abolition of slavery.”10 This required a new approach to management within a dynamic global environment.

…

See mass production mechatronics, 101, 174n27 knowledge economy, 15, 20, 25, 79 knowledge transfer, 70 knowledge wars, 19–23, 28, 30–36, 32, 38, mental revolution, 71 meritocracy, 9, 18, 133–36, 146, 182n3, 187n31 40–41, 43–48, 59, 123, 150–51, 158–59, 164, 168n3. See also knowledge workers; knowledge-driven economy knowledge workers, 6, 8–9, 18–19, 66, 68, 72–76, 80–82, 84, 96, 99, 104, 108, 110–12, 123, 126–27, 137–38, 147–48, Mexico, 35 MG Rover, 42 Michaels, Ed, 85–86, 93, 176n8 micromanagement, 74 middle class as agrarian peasants, 182n48 153, 159, 180n17. See also knowledge wars; knowledge-driven economy knowledge-driven economy, 2, 4–5, 23–27, 37, 65–68, 85, 96, 155, 173n9. See also knowledge wars; knowledge workers 194 labor arbitrage, 97, 99, 106–7, 111, 159 Index Brazil, 182n43 China, 2, 130 corporate profits, 110 downward mobility, 138 emerging economies, 130–31 erosion of benefits, 121–22 financial crash of 2008, 6 global, 128–29, 130, 131 Nike, 102 global poverty, 182n43 globalization, 47–48 growth of, 18 income inequalities, 9, 118–19, 120 income stagnation, 5 Obama, Barack, 3, 23, 27, 147 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 31, 35, 91, 109, 149, 168n2 office management, 72, 127 India, 2, 30, 34, 130 Italy, 130, 182n43 mechanical Taylorism, 81 offshoring, 109, 152 offshoring, 8, 46, 51–52, 55–56, 60, 73, 75, 77–78, 90–93, 99, 107–11, 119, 129, 152, 170–71n2, 180n17 Ohmae, Kenichi, 104–5 opportunity bargain, 132 opportunity gap, 141 opportunity bargain American Dream, 27, 132 oasis operations, 64 opportunity trap, 143 politics of more, 186n16 positional conflict, 134 bidding wars, 183–84n22 corporate profits, 124 credentials, 184–85n2 prosperity, 2 purchasing power parity (PPP), 129, 131 development of, 4–6 digital Taylorism, 65, 155 quality-cost revolution, 59 salaries, 118–19, 120 soft currencies, 140–41 economy of hope, 148–49, 164 education and, 4–6, 27–28 and the global auction, 132 war for talent, 84, 91, 96–97 Mills, C.

…

It encourages the segmentation of talent in ways that reserve permission to think to a small proportion of elite employees responsible for driving the business forward, functioning cheek by jowl with equally wellqualified workers in more Taylorized jobs. Many knowledge workers may disappear off the talent radar screen. This process is at an early stage in many organizations, as we’ve already indicated, but we can distinguish three types of knowledge worker: developers, demonstrators, and drones. Developers include the high potentials and top performers discussed in the next chapter. They represent no more than 10–15 percent of an organization’s workforce given “permission to think” and include senior researchers, managers, and professionals.

Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge by William H. Inmon, Bonnie K. O'Neil, Lowell Fryman

affirmative action, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, continuous integration, corporate governance, create, read, update, delete, database schema, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, informal economy, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, semantic web, tacit knowledge, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application

Is this the same type of experience that people would have if they were unable to find information to do their jobs? 4.4.1.1 Information and “Knowledge Workers” Peter Drucker first created the term “knowledge worker” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The economy of the twenty-first century is an information economy, and most workers today are knowledge workers who produce abstract work products consisting mainly of information, not tangible items like cars or pencils. Therefore, the know-how of the knowledge worker is not necessarily knowledge of everything, but knowing where to find it. Samuel Johnson, who compiled the first English dictionary in the 1700s, said: 66 Chapter 4 Business Metadata, Communication, and Search Figure 4.4 Searching for a Needle in a Haystack.

…

. ✦ The average knowledge worker spends 2.5 hours/day (30%) searching for information. ✦ The enterprise employs 1000 knowledge workers. ✦ 50% of information is not centrally indexed (housed in silos as on someone’s notebook computer or a database). ✦ 50% of Web searches fail/are abandoned. 4.4.2.3 Employee Time Wasted Based on these assumptions, Feldman calculated that the enterprise wastes $48,000 per week, or almost $2.5 million a year in searches. This number is an estimate only; she did not factor in employee vacations. 4.4.2.4 Duplicating/Reworking Information Knowledge workers inadvertently re-create information because they can’t access the original work products.

…

Here is IAIDQ’s definition of information quality (three separate definitions are given, one having two components): Information quality: (1) Consistently meeting all knowledge worker and end-customer expectations in all quality characteristics of the information products and services required to accomplish the enterprise mission (internal knowledge worker) or personal objectives (end customer). (2) The degree to which information consistently meets the requirements and expectations of all knowledge workers who require it to perform their processes. (Larry English, noted data and information quality expert and author) Information Quality: The fitness for use of information; information that meets the requirements of its authors, users, and administrators.

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

There is no need for robotic arms or, in fact, any moving parts at all. Another, more common, term for people with software jobs is, of course, knowledge worker. Software jobs are also highly subject to offshoring. The conventional wisdom used to be that becoming a knowledge worker represented the best path to a prosperous future. The advent of offshoring has increasingly called this proposition into question. Today, offshoring is impacting knowledge workers across the board. Jobs in fields such as radiology, accounting, tax preparation, graphic design, and especially all types of information technology are already being shipped to India and to other countries.

…

In fact, we can reasonably say that software jobs (or knowledge worker jobs) are typically high paying jobs. This creates a very strong incentive for businesses to offshore and, when possible, automate these jobs. Another point we can make is that there is really no relationship between how much training is required for a human being, and how difficult it is to automate the job. To become a lawyer or a radiologist requires both college and graduate degrees, but this will not hold off automation. It is a relatively simple matter to program accumulated knowledge into an algorithm or enter it into a database. For knowledge workers, there is really a double dose of bad news.

…

Not only are their jobs potentially easier to automate than other job types because no investment in mechanical equipment is required; but also, the financial incentive for getting rid of the job is significantly higher. As a result, we can expect that, in the future, automation will fall heavily on knowledge workers and in particular on highly paid workers. In cases where technology is not yet sufficient to automate the job, offshoring is likely to be pursued as a interim solution. Given this reality, it may be that the simulation we performed in Chapter 1 was actually somewhat conservative. Look back at the table listing traditional jobs. Very few of these people are knowledge workers. In our simulation, we assumed that automation would fall evenly on some significant percentage of the average lights in the tunnel.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

Drucker’s enthusiasm for empowerment was reinforced by his belief that the old industrial proletariat was being replaced by knowledge workers. He believed that the advanced world was moving from “an economy of goods” to “a knowledge economy,” and that management was changing as a result: managers needed to learn how to engage the minds, rather than simply control the hands, of their workers. This softer approach was a direct challenge to Taylor’s stopwatch theories and their fans in business. But the idea of a “knowledge worker” (a term that Drucker coined in 1959) also posed questions for politicians. It suggested that rather than defending dying industries against cheaper, less “knowledgeable” workers abroad, governments should concentrate on improving the country’s stock of knowledge, but otherwise keep well out of the way.

…

It suggested that rather than defending dying industries against cheaper, less “knowledgeable” workers abroad, governments should concentrate on improving the country’s stock of knowledge, but otherwise keep well out of the way. Drucker did not confine himself to the question of how managers and governments ought to handle these new knowledge workers. He spent much of his career looking at how the knowledge workers themselves could come to terms with this new world in which they were neither workers nor bosses. Knowledge workers have much more freedom than old-fashioned workers because they control the most important productive asset of modern society: their brainpower. Brainworkers are free, or, in the jargon that Drucker did not invent but unfortunately helped to legitimize, “empowered” to shape their own careers, hopping from firm to firm in pursuit of the highest salary or the most interesting job.

…

Brainworkers are free, or, in the jargon that Drucker did not invent but unfortunately helped to legitimize, “empowered” to shape their own careers, hopping from firm to firm in pursuit of the highest salary or the most interesting job. But freedom could be destabilizing as well as liberating: knowledge workers needed more training and different pension arrangements, for example. Drucker knew whereof he spoke: an itinerant Mittel-European who had dabbled in banking and journalism and always remained ambivalent about America’s hyperspecialized academic system, he was an archetypical knowledge worker. But he was a knowledge worker with a growing number of acolytes in the real world. The younger Henry Ford took The Concept of the Corporation as his text when he tried to rebuild his company after the war.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Clearly some of the value of Teach First has been in attracting more able young people with top degrees back into teaching, but wherever it has been tried it has usually been accompanied by other changes, such as breaking the monopoly of teacher training in education faculties and generally disrupting groupthink in public service professions. A concluding observation: the knowledge worker is increasingly a female worker. The rise and rise of the knowledge worker in the last three decades is also, in part, about the rise and rise of the female professional. Women in the United Kingdom have not only caught up with but overtaken men in jobs that require higher education. In 1997, 28 percent of men and 23 percent of women were in such jobs.

…

Artisanal skills are also being rediscovered in some corners of the economy, especially in food and drink production, often by affluent young professionals. Indeed, a shift away from Head and toward Hand and Heart seems to be programmed into many of the biggest social and economic trends: in the knowledge economy’s declining appetite for all but the most able knowledge workers; the growing concern for place and environmental protection, including more labor-intensive organic farming; and the inevitable expansion of care functions of various kinds in an aging society. These are trends that are likely to be reinforced by the Covid-19 crisis, which revealed that most of the “key workers” who support our daily lives were Hand and Heart workers, mainly people without university degrees.

…

Political parties of both the center-left and center-right have taken as axiomatic that modern society will see a continuing expansion of secure, middle-class, professional graduate jobs. Both education and social mobility policy are based on this assumption. Yet it is almost certainly wrong. The knowledge economy does not need an ever-growing supply of knowledge workers. (See Chapter Nine.) It still needs a top layer of the cognitively most able and original, but much of the work required of middle ranking professionals is already substantially routinized, a kind of digital Taylorism. The American economist Paul Krugman spotted this back in 1996. Writing for the New York Times but imagining himself looking back from one hundred years in the future, he saw that manipulating information was going to lose its value: “The long-ago prophets of the information age seem to have forgotten basic economics… A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value.

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science) by Thierry Bardini

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Engelbart believed that the activity of the knowledge worker actually in- volves "core" processes that for the most part are not themselves highly spe- cialized: "a record of how this person used his time, even if his work was highly specialized, would show that specialized work . . . while vital to his ef- fectiveness, probably occupied a small fraction of his time and effort" (ibid., 10). If so, that meant knowledge workers didn't have to be isolated from each other, segregated by the specific demands of the software necessary to their individual tasks. Instead, they could use a common interface and be connected into a network that would link the user with other users. Envisioning the user as a knowledge worker and conceptualizing the knowledge worker in this par- ticular way allowed Engelbart to begin to see a way in which one central aspect of his crusade could be realized.

…

One way Engelbart sought to exert influence over "the human side" was by developing what he called "the augmented knowledge workshop," "the place in which knowledge workers do their work" (Engelbart, Watson, and Norton 1973, 9). This application of the bootstrapping principle was used between 1965 and 1968 to add another dimension to the ARC lab's conceptualization of the virtual user. Engelbart believed that the activity of the knowledge worker actually in- volves "core" processes that for the most part are not themselves highly spe- cialized: "a record of how this person used his time, even if his work was highly specialized, would show that specialized work . . . while vital to his ef- fectiveness, probably occupied a small fraction of his time and effort" (ibid., 10).

…

If you were will- Ing to put In these ten hours of effort, and also you had to be a little bIt adaptable. You had to be a computer person. (Kay 1992) Thus, the knowledge worker again became a "computer person," but this time it was not the sort of computer person who had undergone the transforma- tions of the bootstrapping enterprise within the community that had evolved within the ARC lab at SRI, but real computer users. What had seemed the most "natural" group of people to start augmenting now became the only group augmented: the knowledge worker became a generic programmer again. The growth of the number of potential users via the ARPANET quickly re- vealed what some considered to be technological flaws in the system: The communIcation, in our lab [ARC at SRI], was very high performance. . . a quarter second response was not at all unusual.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Inequality has risen in most metropolitan areas in the United States since 1980, but it has risen fastest in large, thriving cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago, where it is now much higher than the national average.25 Wages for high-skilled knowledge workers in these places have soared, but pay for the low-skilled service workers supporting them has languished, a gulf that is compounded by the rapidly rising cost of living in these cities. As knowledge workers have flocked to gentrifying inner cities in recent decades, these global metropolises have increasingly come to resemble ivory towers, with a highly concentrated core of prosperity served by a sprawling periphery of disadvantage.

…

In one global survey in 2021, a quarter of workers never wanted to go into the office again, while another quarter never wanted to work from home again; the remaining half preferred some kind of middle ground.6 With time we expect that the downsides of remote working – for employee experience and company performance – will lead many companies to increase the share of days that staff are expected to be present in the office. That will place a ceiling on how far away these workers can move. And many knowledge workers with the financial means to do so have chosen to continue living in urban centres despite a shorter commute no longer offering the same advantage. As argued in Chapter 4, the lifestyle of the inner city, with its cultural variety and ease of access to a wide range of services, is a major factor in the appeal of these neighbourhoods. Equally, cities have no cause for complacency. The exodus of knowledge workers from inner cities may well have peaked, but the transition to hybrid arrangements will still have significant implications for offices, public transport systems and municipal finances.

…

The result is that companies in many fast-growing industries want to be located in cities where they feel confident they can access the types of skills they require. This further reinforces the benefit to workers from locating in such areas, in a virtuous cycle of increasing talent density. A second reason for the increasing strength of agglomeration effects is the way in which knowledge workers in particular become more productive when located near to one another. Information may be more available than ever, but the evidence suggests that it still tends to flow largely through in-person networks, spurred on by casual encounters within and outside the workplace. Inventors filing for patents are twice as likely to cite patents from their own city than from other places, even after excluding those generated within the same company.25 The physical proximity of people in cities is particularly important when it comes to drawing inspiration and knowledge from diverse fields.

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

In 1973, enchanted by the ideas of economist Peter Drucker, he coauthored a paper called "The Augmented Knowledge Workshop," which was based on the idea, formulated by Drucker, that information was destined to be the fulcrum of the economy. "By 1960," wrote Engelbart, "the largest single group [of Americans] was professional, managerial, and technical-that is knowledge workers. By 1975-1980 this group will embrace the majority of Americans." It was these knowledge workers who would sit in the cybercockpits of the Engelbart augmentation scheme: as he termed it, "the office of the future." Knowledge workers. The office of the future. These twO catch phrases would later be appropriated by the marketers charged with selling the Macintosh. But Engelbart's bosses at SRI weren't concerned with marketing his product.

…

''A computer for the rest of us." Now, the bulk of people-those who would drive the curve up to the mountain peak, and ring the curve-shaped bell-would be computer customers. These, he would say, echoing Doug Engelbarr's prediction of a decade before, were the knowledge workers-the target market for the Mac. "Our definition of knowledge worker is someone who sits behind a desk and plans to take information and crunch it with ideas," he'd say. Then he would mention the philosophical dream: "The philosophical dream is How can we do something that will improve people's lives?" Murray would pause and confide that, "You don't find that in any other computer company."

…

Poor Barbara Koalkin had to pry me away from the machine in order to give her canned spiel, which was sort of an overture before the opera, introducing themes I would hear developed with great intensity later on in the performance. I don't recall a word of it, really, but my notebook shows that I was dutifully jotting down key phrases, like "designed to be low-cost personal computer," "personal productivity tool for knowledge workers," and "we want everybody in the world using Mac software." Anyway, I was dazzled, a feeling that would only accelerate as the day went on. Each person I met was a young wizard bubbling with enthusiasm-I could almost feel electricity crackling as they told me their stones. Jerry Manock, the industrial designer who had literally molded the Apple II and now the Macintosh.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

Boston had not offered Lycos any tax breaks or other bribes; in fact, the costs of doing business in Boston, from rents to salaries, were much higher than in Pittsburgh. Lycos was moving because the talent it needed was already in Boston. The key to urban success, I argued in my 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, was to attract and retain talent, not just to draw in companies. The knowledge workers, techies, and artists and other cultural creatives who made up the creative class were locating in places that had lots of high-paying jobs—or a thick labor market; lots of other people to meet and date—what I called a thick mating market; and a vibrant quality of place, with great restaurants and cafés, a music scene, and lots of other things to do.2 By the turn of the twenty-first century, the ranks of the creative class had grown to some 40 million members, a third of the US workforce.

…

Both the conventional wisdom and economic research tell us that people do better economically in large, dense, knowledge-based cities where they earn higher wages and salaries. But when a colleague and I looked into how the members of each of the three different classes fared after paying for housing, we uncovered a startling and disturbing pattern: The advantaged knowledge workers, professionals, and media and cultural workers who made up the creative class were doing fine; their wages were not only higher in big, dense, high-tech metros, but they made more than enough to cover the costs of more expensive housing in these places. But the members of the two less advantaged classes—blue-collar workers and service workers—were sinking further behind; they actually ended up worse off in large, expensive cities and metro areas after paying for their housing.4 The implications were deeply disturbing to me.

…

In these places, mere gentrification has escalated into what some have called “plutocratization.”6 Some of their most vibrant, innovative urban neighborhoods are turning into deadened trophy districts, where the global super-rich park their money in high-end housing investments as opposed to places in which to live. It’s not just musicians, artists, and creatives who are being pushed out: growing numbers of economically advantaged knowledge workers are seeing their money eaten up by high housing prices in these cities, and they have started to fear that their own children will never be able to afford the price of entry in them. But it is the blue-collar and service workers, along with the poor and disadvantaged, who face the direst economic consequences.

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

adjacent possible, Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, deal flow, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, web application, winner-take-all economy

Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. This is what happened to me with my guitar playing, to the chess players who stuck to tournament play, and to most knowledge workers who simply put in the hours: We all hit plateaus. When I first encountered the work of Ericsson and Charness, this insight startled me. It told me that in most types of work—that is, work that doesn’t have a clear training philosophy—most people are stuck. This generates an exciting implication. Let’s assume you’re a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you’ll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better.

…

To help these efforts I introduced the well-studied concept of deliberate practice, an approach to work where you deliberately stretch your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance. Musicians, athletes, and chess players know all about deliberate practice. Knowledge workers, however, do not. This is great news for knowledge workers: If you can introduce this strategy into your working life you can vault past your peers in your acquisition of career capital. RULE #3 Turn Down a Promotion (Or, the Importance of Control) Chapter Eight The Dream-Job Elixir In which I argue that control over what you do, and how you do it, is one of the most powerful traits you can acquire when creating work you love.

…

This insight brought me into the world of performance science, where I encountered the concept of deliberate practice—a method for building skills by ruthlessly stretching yourself beyond where you’re comfortable. As I discovered, musicians, athletes, and chess players, among others, know all about deliberate practice, but knowledge workers do not. Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague, a reality emphasized by the typical cubicle dweller’s obsessive e-mail–checking habit—for what is this behavior if not an escape from work that’s more mentally demanding? As I researched these ideas, I became increasingly worried about the current state of my academic career.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

People have to understand how the way we work is being transformed, where this New Economy is heading, and how it will change our lives and the lives of our families. This is where the politics of the Long Boom conies in, A clear vision needs to be articulated by strong leaders to everyone, humanity at large, not just an elite of financial traders or knowledge workers. Everybody has to have a general understanding of the direction we're heading. That's the way through the anxiety and back onto the Long Boom. As if the anxiety over the turndown in the global economy weren't enough, there's the mounting anxiety over the state of our technology. As the new century approaches, the year 2000, or Y2K, problem looms large.

…

California tends to be the place to study this ideology because the people who embrace it tend to congregate in large numbers there. These people are the technologists and programmers and engineers who are building the new technologies in Silicon Valley. They are creators of new and old media based in Los Angeles. They are the entrepreneurs and knowledge workers of this New Economy. They are the business elite and global finance class chasing after the massive opportunities. They are the young people creating this new digital, wired culture. California attracts a lot of them—from all over the world. The draw of California has created the multicultural mix that has led to some of the key characteristics of the New American Ideology, such as its global mentality.

…

In that hypothetical town, everyone on the network benefits from the addition of every new member, and everyone will benefit most by having everyone wired. The same logic applies to the Internet of today. There's a strong incentive to get everyone into this emerging new network—not just the top quarter of the population, who fit the knowledge worker profile. Getting everyone on the Net is not just some philanthropic urge to be nice to all people. It makes good business sense. You want to sell your products over the Internet? The first step is getting every potential customer into that network to begin with. You want to streamlin costs by doing away with employee paperwork?

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

But Drucker also, more than half a century ago, predicted the shift to what he dubbed a “knowledge economy” and, with it, the rise of the “knowledge worker.” Drucker made his name in America, but he was a product of the Viennese intellectual tradition—Joseph Schumpeter was a family friend and frequent guest during his boyhood—of looking for the big, underlying social and economic forces and trying to spot the moments when they changed. Accordingly, he saw the emerging knowledge worker as both the product and beneficiary of a profound shift in how capitalism operated. “In the knowledge society the employees—that is, knowledge workers—own the tools of production,” Drucker wrote in a 1994 essay in the Atlantic.

…

But that logic collapses in the knowledge economy: “Increasingly, the true investment in the knowledge society is not in machines and tools but in the knowledge of the knowledge worker. . . . The market researcher needs a computer. But increasingly this is the researcher’s own personal computer, and it goes along where he or she goes. . . . In the knowledge society the most probable assumption for organizations . . . is that they need knowledge workers far more than knowledge workers need them.” Here, then, is another way that some of the highly talented are catapulted into the super-elite: when it becomes possible for them to practice their profession independently.

…

But they still didn’t have the royal jelly: “They don’t have the killer instinct, they don’t want to fight, they won’t go for the jugular.” By way of evidence, he described a subordinate who had cried when he told her she had made a mistake. You can’t do that and win, he said. THREE SUPERSTARS A society in which knowledge workers dominate is under threat from a new class conflict: between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of people, who will make their living traditionally, either by manual work, whether skilled or unskilled, or by work in services, whether skilled or unskilled. —Peter Drucker It is probably a misfortune that . . . popular writers . . . have defended free enterprise on the ground that it regularly rewards the deserving, and it bodes ill for the future of the market order that this seems to have become the only defense of it which is understood by the general public. . . .

Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent by Joel Spolsky

AOL-Time Warner, Build a better mousetrap, David Heinemeier Hansson, functional programming, knowledge worker, linear programming, no silver bullet, nuclear winter, off-by-one error, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, Superbowl ad, the scientific method, type inference, unpaid internship

In either case, you should enforce the simple rule “no code without spec.” The Joel Test 163 8. Do Programmers Have Quiet Working Conditions? There are extensively documented productivity gains provided by giving knowledge workers space, quiet, and privacy. The classic software management book Peopleware3 documents these productivity benefits extensively. Here’s the trouble. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into “flow,” also known as being “in the zone,” where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration.

…

All because the metrics in place just didn’t have a way to recognize different types of contributors. If it wasn’t bad enough that metrics don’t measure, they also screw up perfectly happy, productive teams. True, Some Developers Just Don’t Pull Their Weight Even though metrics simply don’t work with knowledge workers, it’s still true that there are great developers and decent developers and crappy developers. Interestingly, everybody pretty much knows who is who. You just can’t quite measure it. Fixing Suboptimal Teams 129 You still need to triage the team into three categories: 1. Great developer 2. Needs specific improvements 3.

…

If a coworker asks you a question, causing a oneminute interruption, but this knocks you out of the zone badly enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you’re in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffeinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone. With programmers, it’s especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short-term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can’t remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing The Joel Test 165 that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Their ranks are made up largely of the new professionals, the highly trained symbolic analysts or knowledge workers who manage the new high-tech information economy. This small group, numbering fewer than 3.8 million individuals, earns as much as the entire bottom 51 percent of American wage earners, totaling more than 49.2 million. 40 In addition to the top 4 percent of American income earners who make up the elite of the knowledge sector, another 16 percent of the American workforce also consists mostly of knowledge workers. Altogether, the knowledge class, which represents 20 percent of the workforce, receives $1,755 billion a year in income, more than the other four fifths of the population combined.

…

A fair and equitable distribution of the productivity gains would require a shortening of the workweek around the world and a concerted effort by central governments to provide alternative employment in the third sector-the social economy-for those whose labor is no longer required in the marketplace. If, however, the dramatic productivity gains of the high-tech revolution are not shared, but rather used primarily to enhance corporate profit, to the exclusive benefit of stockholders, top corporate managers, and the emerging elite of high-tech knowledge workers, chances are that the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots will lead to social and political upheaval on a global scale. All around us today, we see the introduction of breathtaking new technologies capable of extraordinary feats. We have been led to believe that the marvels of modem technology would be our salvation.

…

Today, however, as all these sectors fall victim to rapid restructuring and automation, no "significant" new sector has developed to absorb the millions who are being displaced. The only new sector on the horizon is the knowledge sector, an elite group of industries and profeSSional disciplines responsible for ushering in the new high-tech automated economy of the future. The new professionals-the so-called symbolic analysts or knowledge workers-come from the fields of science, engineering, management, consultancy, teaching, marketing, media, and entertainment. While their numbers will continue to grow, they will remain small compared to the number of workers displaced by the new generation of "thinking machines." 36 THE TWO F ACE S 0 F TEe H N 0 LOG Y RETRAINING FOR WHAT?

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

As we will explore in a later chapter, these individuals, too, will have an increasing opportunity to become passionate about their work. Most jobs in Western corporations have been engineered (and we use this word advisedly) to become highly routinized, especially if they are not performed by “knowledge workers.” As we begin to realize that scalable efficiency cannot see us through a shift to near-constant disruption, we will begin to see that performance improvement by everyone counts, not just performance improvement for “knowledge workers.” We will begin to redefine all jobs, especially those performed at the “bottom of the institutional pyramid,” in ways that facilitate problem solving, experimentation, and tinkering.

…

The real opportunity is to rethink all aspects of the institution through the talent lens—what would the strategy, operations, and organization of the firm be like if talent development were the top priority of the firm? We’ve already talked about how institutional leaders have to focus on everyone in their organization—and not just the so-called knowledge workers. But let’s take it one step further, because there are yet more misunderstandings that arise on the topic of talent development, revealing some of the key assumptions that most executives bring to this topic. We have already noted in earlier chapters that Western executives tend to draw a firm line between “knowledge workers” and the rest of the workforce. If we are going to mobilize our entire workforce, we need to abandon this artificial distinction and recognize that everyone brings talent to the job that must be developed.

…

We will begin to redefine all jobs, especially those performed at the “bottom of the institutional pyramid,” in ways that facilitate problem solving, experimentation, and tinkering. This will foster more widespread performance improvement. Everyone, even the most unskilled worker, will be viewed as a critical problem-solver and knowledge-worker contributing to performance improvement. One need only walk through the assembly lines of a Toyota plant to see highly motivated workers who are passionate about their jobs because they can tangibly see how they are making a difference by tackling challenging work problems and contributing to greater value. Others will rightly point out that in recessionary times many people may lose their jobs no matter how passionate they might be.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

In London: World City, rivals such as Tokyo, New York and Berlin were analysed for their initiatives in the soft economy and their active pursuit of the benefits of agglomeration (LPAC, 1991: 26–27). The report was, it turned out, prescient in identifying inter-urban competition around human capital and quality of life. Subsequently, however, more subtle understandings of the push-and-pull factors for mobile knowledge workers and international firms have prompted more refined and targeted attraction and retention strategies. Innovative solutions have been applied to the intricacy of negotiated and collaborative governance, both between tiers of government and between public and private sectors. London now has a much wider set of practices to learn from other cities, from Singapore to Seattle, from Seoul to São Paulo.

…

Partnerships with institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds, niche fund managers and syndicated investment clubs are under negotiation in cities everywhere. Finally, the new business cycle has brought into clarity the reality of demographic change that is profoundly shaping cities’ revenue capabilities and service delivery demands. As well as increased mobility, especially of younger knowledge workers and aspirational immigrants, cities are confronted with dramatically extended life expectancies often coupled with low birth rates. As a result, urban life is for the most part becoming more and more racially, socially and economically diverse. This produces greater heterogeneity in citizenry aspirations, and the need for world cities to provide distinctive services and representation to different population segments.

…

Key developments in the global system of cities in 2015 The composite of index results has indicated since at least 2011 that Singapore and Hong Kong form part of an expanded ‘big six’ of top-tier world cities. The pair, which possess distinct self-governing capacities, have continued to record exceptional results among executives, knowledge workers and tourists in 2013 and 2014, and have moved ahead of Paris and Tokyo as financial centres. Investment from Europe, North America and the Middle East still flows heavily into these two cities, not least because of their proximity to a rapidly expanding Asian middle class. Singapore is now a world-class research hub, and the only world city consistently positively evaluated for its commuting experience, health and security outcomes.

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom Demarco, Timothy Lister

A Pattern Language, An Inconvenient Truth, cognitive dissonance, DeepMind, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Parkinson's law, performance metric, skunkworks, supply-chain management, women in the workforce

Same with user support for another product. To the extent that knowledge workers are required to multitask, their managers need to take account of the flow requirements of the different tasks. Mixing flow and highly interruptive activities is a recipe for nothing but frustration. In particular, it assures that no reasonable telephone ethic (“Leave me alone. I’m working.”) can emerge. More important than any gimmick you introduce is a change in attitude. People must learn that it’s okay sometimes not to answer their phones, and their managers need to understand that as well. That’s the character of knowledge workers’ work: The quality of their time is important, not just its quantity.

…

There is probably no hope of changing the view that Wall Street takes of treating investment in people as an expense. But companies that play this game will suffer in the long run. The converse is also true: Companies that manage their investment sensibly will prosper in the long run. Companies of knowledge workers have to realize that it is their investment in human capital that matters most. The good ones already do. Part IV: Growing Productive Teams Think back over a particularly enjoyable work experience from your career. What was it that made the experience such a pleasure? The simplistic answer is, “Challenge.”

…

As a manager, you may have convinced yourself that you ought to be the principal coach to the team or teams that report to you. That certainly was a common model in the past, when high-tech bosses tended to be proven experts in the technologies their workers needed to master. Today, however, the typical team of knowledge workers has a mix of skills, only some of which the boss has mastered. The boss usually coaches only some of the team members. What of the others? We are increasingly convinced that the team members themselves provide most of the coaching. When you observe a well-knit team in action, you’ll see a basic hygienic act of peer-coaching that is going on all the time.

Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David J. Anderson

airport security, anti-pattern, business intelligence, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, continuous integration, corporate governance, database schema, domain-specific language, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, performance metric, six sigma, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

Take actions to get to this level of maturity incrementally—follow the Recipe for Success. Attack Sources of Variability to Improve Predictability Both the effects of variability and how to reduce it within a process are advanced topics. Reducing variability in software development requires knowledge workers to change the way they work—to learn new techniques and to change their personal behavior. All of this is hard. It is therefore not for beginners or for immature organizations. Variability results in more work-in-progress and longer lead times. This is explained more fully in chapter 19. Variability creates a greater need for slack in non-bottleneck resources in order to cope with the ebb and flow of work as its effects manifest on the flow of work through the value stream.

…

For example, if we had ten people and anticipated two people per item, the WIP limit might be five plus a few more to smooth the impact of a blockage. Perhaps eight (five plus three) would be the right limit in such circumstances. There has been some research and empirical observation to suggest that two items in progress per knowledge worker is optimal. This result is often quoted to justify multi-tasking. However, I believe that this research tends to reflect the working reality in the organizations observed. There are a lot of impediments and reasons for work to become delayed. The research does not report the organizational maturity of the organizations studied, nor does it correlate the data with any of the external issues (assignable-cause variations, discussed in chapter 19) occurring.

…

Demonstrating the Value of Managers The operations review also shows the staff what managers do and how management can add value in their lives. It also helps to train the workforce to think like managers, and to understand when to make interventions and when to stand back and leave the team to self-organize and resolve its own issues. Operations review helps to develop respect between the individual knowledge workers and their managers and between different layers of management. Growing respect builds trust, encourages collaboration, and develops the social capital of the organization. Organizational Focus Fosters Kaizen While individual project retrospectives are always useful, an organization-wide ops review fosters institutionalization of changes, improvements, and processes.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

It was a stakeholder crisis from the start, and it highlighted a host of stakeholder issues. The pandemic put workers at risk, as they were forced to address the threat of being exposed to the virus in the workplace. And it quickly became clear the pandemic would widen the rifts that had plagued Western society in recent years—between knowledge workers and manual workers, between well-educated and less well-educated, between top-tier cities and the rest. Faced with that new reality, CEOs became even more convinced that it was time for business to step forward and play a greater role in healing society’s divides. As Emmanuel Faber, CEO of Danone, told me, “Everything we have seen during the last several months suggests companies will have even more stakeholders than before, with government stepping in, health authorities stepping in, and so on.

…

But plentiful labor is not the same as plentiful talent, and the pandemic seemed to be leading an increasing number of talent-forward companies to take an “employees first” approach. Indeed, as the economy bounced back from COVID in 2021, it became clear that there was an unprecedented battle for talent, giving knowledge workers even more power in the economic debates to come. > Demands for systemic change also intensified. The pandemic exposed flaws in business’s approach to global markets, deepening the divisions within countries and between them, and threatening supply chains. Geopolitical tension between the US and China also challenged the globalist model.

…

Most of the CEOs I talked to believed that, as in the past, technology would create new jobs even as it eliminated old ones. But they weren’t at all convinced that we had the systems in place to prepare the workforce for these new jobs at a fast enough pace. Then the pandemic hit, dealing its hardest blow to those who weren’t knowledge workers—those who worked in factories, or restaurants and retail stores, or in health care or public service, the very people who were most at risk of being left behind by technology. They didn’t have the option of simply taking their work home. Many were furloughed or lost their jobs altogether. Others dropped out of the workforce to take care of children who were not in school, or elderly parents who were most at risk of contracting the disease.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

Drop into a coffee shop in any of the world’s major cities, and you will see peripatetic knowledge workers of the type that Handy described in the early 1990s. Look at the way people talk about the world’s most admired businesses (“What Would Google Do?”), and you will see praise for the kind of knowledge-intensive, collaborative, networked business innovation that would not have seemed out of place in 1990s California or Japan. But some things have turned out somewhat differently, either because they buck the trend of knowledge-intensive, modular businesses and the nomadic, entrepreneurial knowledge workers, or simply because they were less obvious back in 1999.

…

Modern economists, displaying an admirable flair for taking something exciting and giving it a boring name, called this trend “skills-biased technical change.” Labor market economists, particularly Martin Goos, Alan Manning, and David Autor, have suggested a twist on this story that computers are especially good at replacing routine tasks. The twist is that computers don’t replace high-paid knowledge workers, but they are not necessarily replacing the low-paid either. The reason is that many currently low-paid tasks are distinctly nonroutine: waiting on a table, cleaning a bath, or looking after the elderly. Rather, the routine tasks that computers are good at tend to be middle-income jobs, and so they “hollow out” the labor market by replacing middle-income workers (Goos and Manning 2007; Autor 2013).

…

Charles Handy’s 1994 book The Future of Work forecasted, presciently, a future of portfolio jobs and careers for the well-educated and precarious subcontracting for others. Charles Leadbeater’s Living on Thin Air, published at the height of the dot-com bubble, begins with a portrait of the author as a portfolio knowledge worker and then identifies eight characteristics that successful new economy companies would have: they would be cellular, self-managing, entrepreneurial, and integrative; they would offer their staff ownership stakes; and they would need deep reservoirs of knowledge, public legitimacy, and collaborative leadership.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

Midway through the last century, our industrial base began to contract, and low-wage routine jobs moved offshore. As growth in manufacturing jobs stalled, millions of new white-collar jobs for “knowledge workers” (a term coined by Peter Drucker in 1959) were created, fueling the next phase of U.S. economic growth and creating a robust middle class. The economic landscape was dominated by large organizations hungry for mid-level knowledge workers to produce, refine, and manage information. To keep pace with these changes, Americans put increasing priority on education, largely by extending the number of years students spent in school.

…

The number of high school and college graduates soared. With some tweaks (such as including a college prep track in public high schools), the core of the Prussian-American education model—the transfer of basic literacy and numeracy skills and content knowledge from teachers to students—remained effective in preparing students for knowledge-worker jobs. Our education system and economy maintained their productive alliance. As we moved into the 1980s, a handful of people began voicing concerns about the state of education in the United States. They cited data questioning the international competitiveness of our students, reflected in lackluster performance on standardized tests.

…

What matters most in our increasingly innovation-driven economy is not what you know, but what you can do with what you know. The skills needed in our vastly complicated world, whether to earn a decent living or to be an active and informed citizen, are radically different from those required historically. Quite simply, the world has changed, and our schools remain stuck in time. “Knowledge workers” have become obsolete. What the world demands today are “smart creatives,” the term that Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg use to describe the kind of people Google needs to hire in their book How Google Works. In our efforts to “fix” education, we’ve taken a course of action that extirpates the creative spirit and confidence from our youth while drilling them on frivolous things, like memorizing the definition of extirpate for the SAT verbal exam.

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Many of us work from home, or from actual cafés, freelance vagabonds who move from one rickety table to the next, renting the space with our coffee purchases, getting more wired as the day goes on. In January 2014, the Guardian reported that the first British branch of the Russian chain Ziferblat opened in Islington, a London neighbourhood well-known for its clusters of peripatetic knowledge workers. What makes Ziferblat (clock face in Russian) different is that it charges five pence per minute, and patrons get free snacks and coffee, and can make their own food in the kitchen. It’s essentially like renting an office on a micro, minute-by-minute basis. As permanent employment has slowly evaporated in favour of temporary and contract labour, many of us find ourselves with multiple jobs, sometimes spread over several different fields.

…

The trouble with brunch is that it could be so much more, and a closer look at brunch itself reveals its potential. The brunching class, if it embraced a little Veblen and Florida, and took a critical look at how it spends its time, and how others around it do, a collective identity across heretofore loosely related kinds of knowledge workers could be formed. What’s more, that the brunching class exists in places with radically different economic circumstances demonstrates it’s a class consciousness that could be global in scope. The Transnational Buenos Aires Brunch It was nearly two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and we were walking the near-deserted streets of Buenos Aires looking for a very particular brunch spot.

…

A related reshaping of the tectonic plates of class are those knowledge- and creative-class workers who don’t identify with the traditional working class, even if their pay and lack of job security is commensurate with older forms of working-class life (Dickens’ famous Bob Cratchit, though a working-class icon of the early industrial revolution, was essentially a knowledge worker on a contract job with no security, no benefits and poor pay). Taste and sensibility get in the way of seeing the commonalities among the creative and working classes. Work is work, but even if a creative earns less money than a unionized worker, class becomes a kind of ideology that limits the perception of different kinds of work, failing to allow for cross-class identity, but also limits the conversation around a development like Walmart.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

“Nobody can do what we do.” * * * — Part of what’s confusing people about this wave of AI and automation is that the danger zone has expanded. For decades, most automation was focused on repetitive manual tasks, which were concentrated in blue-collar manufacturing jobs, and white-collar knowledge workers largely considered themselves safe. But today, many of the most promising applications of AI and machine learning are in fields like accounting, law, finance, and medicine, which involve lots of tasks like planning, prediction, and process optimization. As it turns out, these are exactly the kinds of things AI does well.

…

Some of the most automation-prone jobs, the study found, were in highly paid occupations in major metropolitan areas like San Jose, Seattle, and Salt Lake City. This is radically different from the way we normally think about AI and automation risk. And it should be a wake-up call to hyper-educated knowledge workers who have historically assumed that automation was someone else’s problem. Wall Street traders learned a hard lesson about their own replaceability many years ago, when high-frequency trading algorithms and computerized stock exchanges wiped out thousands of jobs for human traders on the exchange floors.

…

The industrial economies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries required workers who could perform repetitive tasks at a high, consistent level, and individuality, in a factory setting, could be a liability. (Henry Ford’s famous supposed lament about his workers—“Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?”—echoed the feelings of many old-economy barons.) White-collar knowledge workers performed cognitive labor instead of manual labor, but they, too, often benefited from suppressing their humanity in the quest for peak performance. But as I started reporting more on AI and automation, the message I heard from experts about the modern economy was, essentially, the exact opposite.

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

affirmative action, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, job automation, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, mini-job, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, scientific management, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

The leading social groups of the knowledge society will be ‘knowledge workers’ – knowledge executives who know how to allocate knowledge to productive use; knowledge professionals; knowledge employees. Practically all these knowledge people will be employed in organizations. Yet unlike the employees under capitalism they own both the ‘means of production’ and the ‘tools of production’ – the former through their pension funds which are rapidly emerging in all developed countries as the only real owners, the latter because knowledge workers own their knowledge and can take it with them wherever they go.

…

Drucker, Scott Lash/John Urry and Manuel Castells – will fundamentally change not only the world of work but the very concept of work itself. The most prominent feature of this new society will be the centrality of knowledge as an economic resource. Knowledge, not work, will become the source of social wealth; and ‘knowledge workers’ who have the capacity to translate specialized knowledge into profit-producing innovations (products, technological and organizational innovations, etc.) will become the privileged group in society. The basic economic resource – the ‘means of production’ to use the economist's term – is no longer capital, nor natural resources (the economist's ‘land’), nor ‘labour’.

…

Yet unlike the employees under capitalism they own both the ‘means of production’ and the ‘tools of production’ – the former through their pension funds which are rapidly emerging in all developed countries as the only real owners, the latter because knowledge workers own their knowledge and can take it with them wherever they go. The economic challenge of the post-capitalist society will therefore be the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge worker.20 Many have objected that there is nothing new in this line of argument, since knowledge already played a central role in the industry and services era, perhaps in all epochs of work. Three answers can nevertheless be extracted from the different accounts. Science-dependent reflexive productivity. The outstanding feature of knowledge work is the self-application of knowledge to knowledge as the main source of productivity. There is a circle between science-based technological innovations and the application of these technologies to produce new science-based generations of technologies and products, so that the productivity spiral of the knowledge society is not only kept going but accelerated.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Another reason has been the rise of the knowledge economy and the accompanying decline of the traditional manufacturing and service sectors, which has radically changed the stratification of occupations and attitudes.29 The old class-based politics in which Labour had its roots in the unionised skilled and unskilled working class while the Conservatives had their roots in the professions, middle class and aspirational middle classes is decaying. The Tories cannot rely on knowledge workers to support them automatically. Indeed, it seems that knowledge workers are more liberal on most social issues and are willing to tolerate government action if they feel it might work. Equally, though, Labour cannot rely on the knowledge workers’ support, either. They tend to be more individualistic, suspicious of collectivism in the form of trade unions and resent micro-management by their employers and the state.

…

Another 420,000 have pre-tax incomes of between £100,000 and £350,000. Nearly all of them are male, white and live in the South East.10 There is a growing class of ‘knowledge workers’ who already constitute more than two-fifths of the working population and reflect the fact that the dynamic parts of the knowledge economy – high-tech manufacturing, the creative industries, health, business services, education and ICT – need well-qualified and skilled people. But below them are ten million adults who earn less than £15,000 a year. Few are knowledge workers, and their chance of self-improvement is minimal. Two million children live in low-income working families.

…

In the private sector in particular trade unions have become weaker, partly because of labour market legislation requiring them to ballot workers over strike action and outlawing secondary picketing, but also because of deeper, underlying changes. Knowledge workers in a more knowledge-based economy feel more confident about their capacity to manage their careers proactively and individually. They have skills that employers need, and they have no desire to negotiate their pay and conditions collectively. Consequently, trade union membership in the knowledge-based private sector has plummeted. Equally, knowledge workers are more keenly aware of new workplace realities. Production is less for mass markets and more customised, with much closer relationships with clients and consumers.12 Today’s customers embed their wishes in the production process through service-level agreements, tight contract specifications, default clauses, key performance indicators and so on.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

“Our age has turned literature into a trade.”14 Still, Otlet held out hope for what he called the “disinterested task” of the writer, ultimately envisioning something akin to a gift economy of intellectual work (a notion that has attracted considerable currency among contemporary Internet pundits). He hoped— with perhaps a characteristic surfeit of optimism—that enlightened knowledge workers would one day see the benefits of embracing the monographic principle in their own work, using index cards for note taking, and making their finished work more accessible by breaking 231 C ATA L O G I N G T H E WO R L D it into index-able chunks of information that could move more ­fluidly through the global knowledge network. Still, he recognized that knowledge workers needed to be paid, at least in the here and now. In considering the financial implications of his scheme, Otlet saw a special role for bookstores, given their role as the primary gateways to knowledge for many readers (public libraries were far less common during his era).

…

Highly precise classification, coupled with the ability to “zoom out” on any subject by telescoping back through a series of numbers and expressions, allowed for a level of detail that would, in theory, allow the system to penetrate deep into the granular components of a book or article. In practical terms, Otlet initially envisioned this as a physical volume that would consist of loose-leaf pages, constantly updated by expert authors collecting and extrapolating information from a wide range of primary sources. A federation of knowledge workers around the globe would develop expertise in particular domains and assume responsibility, acting as institutional gatekeepers to knowledge produced within each area. These experts would evaluate each newly published document, assess its content to determine whatever new facts might be contained inside, then transcribe that data onto an index card and assign a code drawn from the Universal Decimal Classification.

…

Drawing on a central repository modeled on the Universal Bibliography, Ostwald and his partners hoped to produce collections of cards that would provide a comprehensive overview of available knowledge on any specific topic. To accomplish that, the Bridge would need to do more than build a large-scale catalog; it would also have to assemble the scholars to work on it. To that end, he envisioned creating a universal directory of scholars, “containing the addresses of all living knowledge workers,” along with pointers to the particular kinds of knowledge those individuals had produced. It would act as a contemporary social network in which both people and documents would serve as nodal points.3 Like Otlet, Ostwald also proposed establishing a transnational organization to coordinate all this.

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland, Jj Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, business cycle, call centre, clean water, death of newspapers, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, Kaizen: continuous improvement, knowledge worker, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, pets.com, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, work culture

The Foundation focuses on helping lift the world’s poor out of poverty, not by handouts but by harnessing the underappreciated strengths of the impoverished. In Uganda they decided to try to do just that, by giving the poor the ability to share and build knowledge. To do it, they recruited some 1,200 people in poor, rural areas—people they called “Community Knowledge Workers” (CKWs). The Foundation had already developed mobile applications for microfinance and payments, and they decided to give these knowledge workers not just banking information, but information they could use in their daily lives, which, in Uganda’s case, meant it would be applied to farming. The Foundation provided access to the best agricultural practices by giving the workers smartphones and conveying the information that way.

…

Not only will that “good” arrive sooner, it will also be measurable. Scrum gives people the ability to measure progress easily. At the Grameen Foundation they have what they call the “Progress Out of Poverty Index.” It measures just how effective each program is. They can poll and see exactly the impact those Community Knowledge Workers with cell phones in rural villages are having. They can experiment with different ways of doing things. They can help people innovate their way out of poverty. For me, it’s amazing to see Scrum returning to its roots. When I first started Scrum, I was inspired by the Grameen Bank and other microfinance institutions and how they helped teams of poor people work together to leverage themselves out of poverty.

…

., 1.1, 3.1, 3.2 Boston Celtics Bowens, Maneka Boyd, John, 8.1, 8.2 brain mapping, multitasking and Brooks, Fred Brooks, Rodney, 2.1, 9.1 Brooks’s Law Brown, Rachel bureaucracy, 9.1, 9.2 Burndown Chart, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, app.1 cabals Cairo call center, Zappos cell phones, 5.1, 9.1 driving and, 5.1, 5.2 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3.1, 6.1 Challenger disaster, 3.1, 3.2 Change Control Boards, 8.1, 9.1 Change for Free change orders Change or Die Chicago Tribune, churches, Scrum at Cohn, Mike Cold War collaboration, 7.1, 7.2 Colorado, Sunshine laws in Colorado, University of, Medical School communication saturation, 4.1, 4.2, 8.1 Community Knowledge Workers (CKWs) complacency, dangers of complex adaptive systems, 2.1, 2.2 Cone of Uncertainty, 119 “Constant Error in Psychological Ratings, A” (Thorndike) context switching, loss to continuous improvement Happiness Metric and happy bubbles and, 7.1 contracts Change for Free in government Coomer, Greg Copenhagen Coplien, Jim Coram, Robert corporate culture change in cost overruns Cowan, Nelson cross-functionality, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 7.1, 8.1 Crozier, William customer-responsive models customers: external vs. internal wants of cynicism Daily Stand-Ups (Daily Scrum), 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, app.1 Dalkey, Norman D-day DeAngelo, Michael Decide, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 8.1, 185 decision loop decision making Product Owner and self-control and Declaration of Independence Delivering Happiness (Hsieh), Delphi method, 6.1, 6.2 Deming, W.

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, call centre, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Freestyle chess, future of work, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, rising living standards, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

The next step: “This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force altogether.” That finding not only makes intuitive sense, it also helps explain America’s unusually low overall employment rate and the stagnation of wages. FROM KNOWLEDGE WORKERS TO RELATIONSHIP WORKERS It sounds as if smart, highly educated people will be scorned in the coming economy—but that is not necessarily the case. To see why not, consider again the situation of lawyers, whose work is increasingly being taken over by infotech. Average lawyers “face a bleak future,” believes Professor McGinnis of Northwestern.

…

As infotech continues its advance into higher skills, value will continue to move elsewhere. Engineers will stay in demand, it’s safe to say, but tomorrow’s most valuable engineers will not be geniuses in cubicles; rather, they’ll be those who can build relationships, brainstorm, collaborate, and lead. Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” in the late 1950s to describe the most valuable workers as economies became increasingly information based. We can see that the term is no longer quite right. More people than ever will be working with knowledge, but knowledge won’t be the source of their greatest value. We need a new term: The most valuable people are increasingly relationship workers.

…

It made sense that the groups with the best social skills would be most successful because what the “socially intelligent participants in our collective intelligence experiment may have been doing was enabling better idea flow by guiding the group toward briefer presentations of more ideas, encouraging responses, and ensuring that everyone contributed equally.” The operational value of social skills was explained. The mystery of how those skills make groups more effective was solved. The people who made teams most effective may or may not have been the best knowledge workers. They were definitely the best relationship workers. PUTTING THE DISCOVERIES TO WORK Human interaction is so powerful that increasing it just a little improves group performance a lot. For example, Pentland and his lab investigated a huge Bank of America call center where the emphasis was on productivity; reducing the average call handle time at that one call center by just 5 percent would save the company $1 million a year.

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

We have data on this going back to the 1800s—at the time when unions forced employers to cut hours, factory owners were surprised to find that productivity increased while accidents decreased. Overwork was counterproductive in the days of the sweatshop, and research shows it still is, even in the age of the knowledge worker. This isn’t just about working hours, of course. It’s no surprise that employers will try to get as many hours as they can from their workers and employees will often put in extra time voluntarily in order to earn promotions or raises. That’s understandable. But we are where we are now because of what happened after the victory over working hours.

…

Northcote Parkinson, for whom the law is named, “is shown in the proverbial phrase ‘It is the busiest man who has time to spare.’ ” Perhaps the reason long hours are unhelpful is that human brains are not designed to put in excessive hours of uninterrupted work. That was true for the employees on Ford’s assembly line and it’s doubly so for the knowledge workers of today. In 1951, two men at the Illinois Institute of Technology kept track of nearly two hundred of their colleagues in the scientific and technical fields. They found that those who put in excessive hours were the least productive of all. After people passed a couple dozen hours in the lab, they saw decreasing returns on their labor.

…

Metrics can be useful and even enlightening, but if they are overused or even employed to measure things that are unmeasurable like innovation, metrics become destructive. Trying to meet numerical goals is also not particularly inspiring to the human mind, and so metrics don’t encourage creative thought. Surveys reveal that 30 percent of knowledge workers claim they do absolutely no thinking while they’re at work and nearly 60 percent say they do less than half an hour of thinking. It’s fair to say that’s an almost complete lack of mental stimulation. Proving your worth by logging an arbitrary number of hours is more than silly—it’s a practice that is killing productivity and, more seriously, endangering your health.

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Developers and municipalities are converting outdated suburban office and industrial parks into walkable, mixed-use business districts that reflect both the changing nature of work in today’s postindustrial economy and the habitat preferences of its leading workers, the “creative class.” Instead of physically, functionally, and stylistically separating the place of work from that of the home in strictly defined single-use areas, today’s retrofits are designed to offer the wired, overworked knowledge worker the multitasking convenience of interconnected mixed use as well as its creativity-enhancing spaces for social networking and recreation. The incorporation of relatively dense urban housing, public spaces, and abundant retail and restaurants into suburban areas formerly limited solely to commercial or industrial activity deliberately blurs the physical boundaries between living, working, and playing.

…

In a report on the Metro Plan commissioned by BellSouth, local newspaper editorial board member David Goldberg wrote, “The temptation to go farther north was tempered by two factors: the tenuousness of highway capacity and lack of rail service much beyond I-295, and the knowledge that many of the young, highly-skilled knowledge workers they hoped to attract from around the country preferred an urban environment to suburban living.”14 After considerable NIMBY opposition, including several lawsuits from neighbors over parking and tree removal, the three business centers in Lenox Park, Midtown, and Lindbergh City Center were completed in 2004.

…

Florida argues that the creative class constitutes a distinct segment of society: the one-third of American workers whose jobs require them to creatively solve problems and advance new thinking. In his words, the members of the creative class are paid not to execute a plan, but to tune it. However, given current and projected labor shortages of highly educated, digitally savvy “knowledge workers,” the most sought-after members of this creative class can afford to be choosy about where they want to work. The crux of Florida’s thesis is that the members of this class are increasingly selecting the area in which they want to live before finding a job—reversing the pattern of many of their parents and grandparents.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter

AOL-Time Warner, business process, cognitive dissonance, financial independence, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, knowledge worker, loss aversion, shareholder value, zero-sum game

I can always get someone else. In the past, the key to wealth may have been control of land, materials, plants, and tools. In that environment, the worker needed the company more than the company needed the worker. Today the key to wealth is knowledge. As a result, the company needs the knowledge worker far more than the knowledge worker needs them. To make matters worse, the workers know this! They see themselves as fungible assets—no longer at the mercy of company whim—rather than dispensable commodities. The difference is subtle but real: As a fungible asset, the free agent sees himself as always getting a better job somewhere else; if he were merely a commodity, anyone could replace him (which, we know, is not true anymore).

…

Checking what you say doesn’t automatically tell you what other people think of you. You may be overly negative, but your colleagues may be capable of living with it. But seeing how people relate to you provides proof that your flaw is serious, that it matters to people, that it’s a problem. Habit #9 Withholding information In the age of knowledge workers, the cliché that information is power is truer than ever—which makes withholding information even more extreme and irritating. Intentionally withholding information is the opposite of adding value. We are deleting value. Yet it has the same purpose: To gain power. It’s the same old need to win, only more devious.

…

But that doesn’t mean that beating the writer with the stick of a salary deduction would appeal to him either. 2. I know what they know. The days when managers know how to do every job in the company better than anyone else are over. The reason Peter Drucker said that the manager of the future will know how to ask rather than how to tell is because Drucker understood that knowledge workers would know more than any manager does. Well, the future is here with a vengeance. And smart managers need to shed the overconfident bias that they know as much as their employees know in specific areas. It’s a blind spot that diminishes their employees’ abilities and enthusiasm, and ultimately shrinks the boss’s stature. 3.

Busy by Tony Crabbe

airport security, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, death from overwork, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gamification, haute cuisine, informal economy, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, loss aversion, low cost airline, machine readable, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, scientific management, Shai Danziger, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple

No matter how organized you are, you will not be able to time-manage your way back to control. All that happens through better organization is that you do more stuff. Since you are still failing to do most of the things you could, or even should do, doing more things won’t help you feel in control; you will just be busier. In fact, a study by Basex showed that 30 percent of knowledge workers were trying to do so much, they had no time for thought at all, and 58 percent had only between fifteen and thirty minutes to think a day!1 In addition, the usefulness of time management gets less and less by the day as the quantity of information, communication and expectation continues to increase.

…

This buzz perpetuates our illusion of efficiency; we delude ourselves into mistaking our ability to machine-gun disconnected tasks for working well. In fact, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, highlighted the scale of the multitasking illusion. He estimated that the increased inefficiency and ineffectiveness of multitasking was wasting 28 billion hours of knowledge workers time a year in the US alone.14 Break your day into big chunks of activity. The more complex the task, the bigger the chunk of uninterrupted time it needs. Of course, life will intervene at times, the director will tap you on the shoulder and distract you, but your goal should be to maximize chunks of focused time

…

Email: The TV of Work One of the most obvious domains in which rampant productivity is demonstrated is our response to email. One study of two thousand UK workers found that 77 percent of them would consider “a productive day in the office” to be clearing their inbox.2 Jonathan B. Spira found that reading and processing just one hundred emails (who only has one hundred emails!) uses up half of a knowledge worker’s time.3 I think email has become the TV of work. It offers little, but it asks little too. So rather than do the big work that will make a difference, we turn on the email and pass the time (productively of course). Transforming Our Success Strategy We may not want to be busy, but few of us are willing to let our career aspirations die to achieve a calmer existence.

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

The UK think tank the Centre for Cities argues, based on successes in the Netherlands and Germany, that making a region thrive depends on increasing the density of its cities to deepen the available pool of knowledge workers available and “make it easier for people and organisations to share information and come up with new ideas.”33 Fourth, a necessary ingredient for a critical mass of knowledge workers is a critical mass of knowledge-intensive jobs. Governments can (in many places, if not everywhere) provide that critical mass by supporting research environments of a certain size. These could be highly research-intensive private institutions, but more obviously they could be research universities (as opposed to educational institutions focused only on teaching), as the economic blogger Noah Smith has strongly advocated as a means of regional regeneration in the United States.34 The evidence supports such calls: research universities create striking economic benefits for the regions they are situated in by increasing the share of high-skilled workers who increase the productivity of local businesses.35 Fifth, and perhaps counterintuitively, aim to globalise the left-behind places.

…

The second political difficulty is that with divergence in terms of economic success came divergence in the real material interests of groups that were rapidly growing apart. That made traditional electoral coalitions harder to straddle. This has been a particularly acute problem for centre-left parties, which have struggled to stitch together policy programmes that appeal to both the liberal knowledge workers in cities and what remains of the more traditional working class. But in many European countries, the traditional centre-right has also struggled in a party landscape that continues to fragment. One might think that seeing a once-powerful voter coalition fragment would make a party that used to rely on it all the more alert to the underlying problem.

…

See also United Kingdom Bulgaria, 219–20 business extension services, 205 Canada, 185, 223 capital: financial, 200–201; human, 199–200; physical, 200; taxation of, 170, 175–83 capital regions, 189, 191–92 carbon tax, 183–87 carbon taxes, 224 car washes, 96–98, 110 Case, Anne, 194 central bank policies, 63, 66–67, 89, 106, 133–34, 138–39, 143–44, 146, 163–66 Centre for Cities, 206–7 centrist politics: liberal order failed by, 229–33; programme of economics of belonging for, 233–39 China: as alternative to Western social order, 6; economic policies of, 6, 241n1; and globalisation, 72–73, 75; income growth in, 20, 21; manufacturing in, 25, 75; as shock to social market economy, 9, 77–78, 81, 249n8 cities: economic growth in, 29–31; income inequalities involving, 190; knowledge workers in, 29–30; role of, in new economies, 29–31; wealth concentration in, 153–54 climate change, 183–84, 223, 237 Clinton, Bill, 117 Clinton, Hillary, 33, 45 coal mining, 126 Cold War, 6 collective bargaining, 52, 54, 56–58, 61, 101, 103, 110, 121–23 communism, collapse of, 211, 231 community banks, 206, 268n25 comparative advantage, 74 competition, market, 5, 30, 112–13, 127–30 Contract with America, 40 corporate taxes, 178–83, 187, 218–19, 264n18 credit cycle, 160–62 credit financing, 155–60 cross-border supply chains, 74–75 cultural values: conflicts of, 15–16; economic factors vs., as driver of voter behaviour, 15–16, 37–49, 230–31; economic grievance expressed in, 48; economic inequality as influence on, 31; nationalism and, 14–15, 38; political significance of, 15–16, 37, 41–42, 47–49; populism and, 15, 38, 42–43; populist vs. elite, 14–15 deaths of despair, 36, 194 Deaton, Angus, 194 debt deflation, 156 debt financing, 155–60 debt restructuring, 159–60, 166 deindustrialisation, 29, 56–62 DeLong, Bradford, 145 demand management, 106, 132–33, 138–44, 146–47, 151, 216–17 Denmark: economic change as trigger for populism in, 42; education policy in, 108; egalitarianism and prosperity in, 99; employment in, 110; job mobility in, 107–8; job training programmes in, 108 digital revolution, market abuse facilitated by, 30, 113, 128–30 Dustmann, Christian, 47 eastern Europe, 191–92 Eatwell, Roger, 38 eBay, 69 economic change, 17–36; causes of, 18, 21; community-level effects of, 9–10, 29–31, 45–47, 49; cultural values elicited by, 48; cultural values vs., as driver of voter behaviour, 15–16, 37–49; gender as factor in, 33–34; government response to, 9, 11–13, 21, 51, 54–70; grievances about, 8, 18, 35–36, 48; harms suffered by the vulnerable in, 9, 35, 61–62, 68, 135, 137–38, 141; illiberalism linked to, 8, 15, 36, 38–49, 39; manufacturing sector and, 22–26; nationalism linked to, 8; populism linked to, 21, 26, 39–44; role of cognitive skills in, 27–29; structural change and, 55–62; usurpation story about, 18, 21–22, 26; Western income stagnation and, 19–21 economic insecurity: community-level effects of, 9–10; illiberal attitudes mobilised by, 48; income inequality linked to, 58–60; policy decisions exacerbating, 61; precarious employment and, 58–61; social contract undermined by, 58–62; in Sweden, 44.

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

Sometime in the early 1970s, Engelbart was inspired by a book, just as he had been enthused by magazine articles by Bush and Licklider in years past. This time, it was the theory proposed by business management expert Peter Drucker in the late 1960s. Knowledge, by Drucker's definition, is the systematic organization of information; a knowledge worker is a person who creates and applies knowledge to productive ends. The rapid emergence of an economy based primarily on knowledge, Drucker predicted, would be the most significant social transformation of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Drucker noted something about the future of knowledge in the American economy that seemed to converge, from an unexpected but not unpredictable direction, with the course Engelbart had plotted for the augmentation project at the beginning of its second decade.

…

Acknowledging their debt to Drucker's ideas, the authors pointed out that the special computer systems that had been evolving at ARC were designed to alleviate the problems associated with "the accelerating rate at which knowledge and knowledge work are coming to dominate the working activity of our society': In 1900 the majority and the largest single group of Americans obtained their livelihood from the farm. By 1940 the largest single group was industrial workers, especially semiskilled machine operators. By 1960, the largest single group was professional, managerial, and technical -- that is, knowledge workers. By 1975-80 this group will embrace the majority of Americans. The productivity of knowledge has already become the key to national productivity, competitive strength, and economic achievement, according to Drucker. It is knowledge, not land, raw materials, or capital, that has become the central factor in production.

…

It is impossible to tell if there would have been a PARC if there hadn't been an ARC, and while the miniaturization revolution made personal computers inevitable in a technical sense, there is good reason to question whether the kind of personal computing that exists today would ever have been developed if it had not been for the pathfinding work accomplished by Engelbart and his colleagues. Doug Engelbart and the people who helped him build ARC did not succeed in building a knowledge workers' utopia. Some hackers do seem to be pathologically attached to computers. These facts might have very little to do with the way other people will use the descendants of the tools they created. In fact, if you think about it, some of the wildest and woolliest of the MAC and ARC hackers were following in a long tradition of people who weren't exactly run-of-the-mill citizens -- from Babbage and Lovelace to Turing and von Neumann.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, behavioural economics, call centre, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, deliberate practice, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional fixedness, game design, George Akerlof, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, side project, TED Talk, the built environment, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, zero-sum game

With the rise of individual longevity and the decline of job security, he argued, individuals have to think hard about where their strengths lie, what they can contribute, and how they can improve their own performance. The need to manage oneself, he wrote shortly before he died in 2005, is creating a revolution in human affairs. Type I Insight: Demanding of knowledge workers that they define their own task and its results is necessary because knowledge workers must be autonomous . . . workers should be asked to think through their own work plans and then to submit them. What am I going to focus on? What results can be expected for which I should be held accountable? By what deadline? More Info: Drucker wrote many books, and many have been written about him, but a great starting place is The Daily Drucker, a small gem that provides 366 insights and action points for putting his ideas into practice.

…

Presidential Medal of Freedom, and taught for three decades at the Claremont Graduate University Business School that now bears his name. Big Idea: Self-management. Drucker's primary contribution is not a single idea, Jim Collins once wrote, but rather an entire body of work that has one gigantic advantage: nearly all of it is essentially right. Drucker coined the term knowledge worker, foresaw the rise of the nonprofit sector, and was among the first to stress the primacy of the customer in business strategy. But although he's best known for his thoughts on managing businesses, toward the end of his career Drucker signaled the next frontier: self-management . With the rise of individual longevity and the decline of job security, he argued, individuals have to think hard about where their strengths lie, what they can contribute, and how they can improve their own performance.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

That made those at the top smarter and better equipped to dominate what was becoming a knowledge economy. It was one of the twentieth century’s great breakthroughs for equality. As you will read, I was a beneficiary of the change and also played a role in embedding it in the legal industry. It had the unintended consequence, however, of entrenching a new aristocracy of rich knowledge workers who were much smarter and more driven than the old-boy network of heirs born on third base. From the 1970s on, they upended corporate America and Wall Street with inventions in law and finance that created an economy built on deals that moved corporate assets around instead of building new assets.

…

In that sense, one could call this great unraveling of American exceptionalism a perfect storm, but one that paradoxically featured what appeared to be bright skies all along the way—milestones in innovation in all the arenas that make America great. Although the chapters that follow each focus on one element of the breakdown, the elements were interrelated. For example, the rise of meritocracy that created a newly entrenched aristocracy of knowledge workers powered the transformation of America into a finance-dominated economy. That in turn created still more demand for financial engineers and lawyers, which further entrenched the meritocracy and widened income inequality. Similarly, the emergence of the First Amendment as a tool enabling unlimited money to finance campaign contributions and to pay for lobbyists to dominate Washington allowed business interests to prevail in multiple battles against the middle class, including fights over unionization.

…

They did it not only by following Jensen’s doctrine and making their compensation rise or fall with the stock price, but also by inventing ways to use shareholder democracy to achieve the ultimate in accountability: throwing managers out of their jobs and replacing them with those who would more single-mindedly boost the short-term price of the stock. The result would be the emergence of an economy where the most money was to be made not by building companies but by deploying thousands of the smartest knowledge workers of the new meritocracy to engineer new ways to rearrange who owned them and create new forms of debt and other financial instruments so that shareholders might score a quick win. THE TAKEOVER FIGHTER Joseph Flom was a pioneering soldier of the meritocracy. Long before meritocracy became the norm two decades later, Flom—short, obese, the son of struggling Jewish immigrants—talked his way into the Harvard Law School class of 1948.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Moving in from the residential rings, the next layer was slated for the manicured campuses of those same multinationals—the back offices, R & D labs, and regional headquarters of the Toyotas and Nokias per-suaded to relocate. Here, one would also find hotels, shopping malls, convention centers—anything and everything to sustain the knowledge workers laboring in the shadow of the airport. In the innermost rings, essentially abutting the runway fences, were the free-trade zones, factories, warehouses, and logistics hubs designed for the FedEx/UPS/DHL combine—the just-in-time manufacturers and suppliers for whom time and distance from the belly of a 747 equals, quite literally, cost.

…

But it’s too much for my neighbors in Park Slope, another patch of brownstones down the hill to the east, where the typical approaching plane swoops so low you can clearly read the “Delta” painted on its sides. The brownstoners have lobbied unsuccessfully to have the flight paths moved over some less fortunate neighborhood. They’re much like my neighbors here—lawyers, writers, and financiers. “Knowledge workers” is what they would call them in New Songdo, where the item at the top of Stan Gale’s to-do list is to woo more of them there. A few blocks west are the docks of Red Hook, where a faint few ships unload containers by day and blow foghorns by night. It’s a rumble as startling as jet wash, though several degrees more romantic because their era seems farther removed.

…

Another is on-site employers any mayor (or governor) would kill for, including a film studio and a maker of solar cells that opened a $100 million factory there last year. But taking their cue from Stapleton’s tenants, the Ratners expect that nearly everyone here will work from home. As BusinessWeek put it, Mesa del Sol “will be the first place of its kind built from scratch and targeted at the creative class.” A big marketing push will be made to coastal knowledge workers looking to cash out of their million-dollar split levels, move inland, and work remotely for their companies. Mansionettes will carry price tags of up to $400,000, about the same as the average Manhattan studio. They’ll feature home offices sequestered from family foot traffic and fully wired for transnational connections.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

In “the assembly-line mentality,” warned Drucker, workers were valued purely in terms of how closely they resembled machines.15 In fact, the most valuable thing about workers was not their hands, but their brains. The importance of empowering workers became more important when Drucker identified a new class of “knowledge workers” (as he dubbed them in 1959). These were lessons that Japanese managers (who read Drucker’s work assiduously) learned rather more quickly than GM. The carmaker’s attempt at talking to its workers came down to suggesting they write an essay, “My Job and Why I Like It.” CORPORATE IMPERIALISM One sign of the success of managerial capitalism is the way that it co-opted its state equivalent after 1945.

…

It was too slow, too methodical, too hierarchical, too reliant on economies of scale that were withering away. It also proved too cumbersome when it came to husbanding knowledge. Brainpower had always mattered in business. But this truism became far more valid after 1975, as Peter Drucker’s knowledge workers finally began to make their weight felt. By the end of 2001, General Motors boasted net-book assets (tangible things like factories, cars, and even cash) of $52 billion, but its market value of $30 billion was only a fifth of that of Merck, a drug firm that could muster a balance sheet value of $7 billion, but had a far more valuable trove of knowledge.

…

It will be replaced by the “network.” Some economies have long centered on webs of interlocking businesses, such as Japan’s keiretsu and South Korea’s chaebol. But the models most commonly cited are the boundaryless firms of Silicon Valley. In theory, these loose-fitting alliances are the ideal homes for Peter Drucker’s knowledge workers. This sounds attractive. But the networking concept has (appropriately enough) bundled together too many contradictory ideas. The older sort of networks, like the keiretsu, which were largely attempts to shield member companies from the market, are now being pulled apart by it. The networks in Silicon Valley, which rely on their sensitivity to market movements, look far more modern, but they are still built around companies.

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

In Italian autonomism, this would be a claim about the ‘general intellect’, where collective cooperation and knowledge become a source of value.3 Such an argument also entails that the labour process is increasingly immaterial, oriented towards the use and manipulation of symbols and affects. Likewise, the traditional industrial working class is increasingly replaced by knowledge workers or the ‘cognitariat’. Simultaneously, the generalised deindustrialisation of the high-income economies means that the product of work becomes immaterial: cultural content, knowledge, affects, and services. This includes media content like YouTube and blogs, as well as broader contributions in the form of creating websites, participating in online forums, and producing software.4 A related claim is that material commodities contain an increasing amount of knowledge, which is embodied in them.

…

Microsoft, meanwhile, has built an artificial intelligence platform that gives businesses the software development tools to build their own bots (‘intelligence as a service’, in the contemporary lingo). And International Business Machines (IBM) is moving to make quantum cloud computing a reality.38 Cloud platforms ultimately enable the outsourcing of much of a company’s information technology (IT) department. This process pushes knowledge workers out and often enables the automation of their work as well. Data analysis, storage of customer information, maintenance of a company’s servers – all of this can be pushed to the cloud and provides the capitalist rationale for using these platforms. The logic behind them is akin to how utilities function.

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

There are extensively documented productivity gains provided by giving knowledge workers space, quiet, and privacy. The classic software management book Peopleware documents these productivity benefits extensively.8 __________ 6. See Chapter 24. 7. For example, the course Daily Themes at Yale University (see www.yale.edu/engl450b/) is famous for requiring students to write an essay every day. 8. Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Second Edition (Dorset House Publishing, 1999). Here's how it works. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into "flow," also known as being "in the zone," where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment.

…

If a coworker asks you a question, causing a one-minute interruption, but this knocks you out of the zone badly enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you're in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffeinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone. With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short-term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.

…

"Reps who spent more than 13 minutes talking to a customer didn't get their monthly bonuses," writes Katrina Brooker.2 "As a result, workers began doing just about anything to get customers off the phone: pretending the line wasn't working, hanging up, or often—at great expense—sending them new parts or computers. Not surprisingly, Gateway's customer satisfaction rates, once the best in the industry, fell below average." It seems like any time you try to measure the performance of knowledge workers, things rapidly disintegrate, and you get what Robert D. Austin calls measurement dysfunction. His book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations3 is an excellent and thorough survey of the subject. Managers like to implement measurement systems, and they like to tie compensation to performance based on these measurement systems.

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Even when the manufacturing sector boomed it didn’t create as many jobs as it had in the past: from 1983 to 1989, real value added by manufacturing grew by 30 percent, but employment only grew by 5.5 percent. Unforgiving competition from abroad forced manufacturing companies to reduce production costs by closing inefficient plants, adopting new technologies, or moving their operations abroad. Meanwhile, knowledge workers advanced rapidly, particularly knowledge workers in the IT and financial-services sectors. Brain-intensive companies such as Microsoft and Apple took over from Ford and General Motors as the symbols of modern times. Even old-line companies became more brain-intensive: manufacturers focused on producing highly engineered products for precise niches rather than on standardized products for mass markets.

…

And yet this was the manufacturing sector’s swan song: the 1956 census revealed that there were more Americans doing white-collar jobs than blue-collar ones, and the most far-sighted commentators asked whether manual workers would go the way of agricultural workers. Peter Drucker coined the phrase “knowledge worker” to describe the rising class. Daniel Bell spotted a “post-industrial society” emerging in the womb of industrial society. Americans began to regard their prowess in winning Nobel Prizes as a measure of the country’s economic virility—between 1943 and 1969, America won twenty-one Nobel Prizes in Physics, far more than any other country, though eleven of the winners were European refugees.

…

Mitchell would have been a familiar figure to the great entrepreneurs of the late nineteenth century: a man obsessed with using mechanical innovations to wrestle resources out of the unforgiving soil. But this era also saw two momentous developments that would have shocked Rockefeller and company far more than using water to extract oil out of rock: the replacement of blue-collar workers with knowledge workers at the heart of the economy and the advance of women in the workforce. Reagan, Bush, and Clinton didn’t just preside over a technological revolution. They also presided over a social revolution that reached into almost every American home. THE NEW WORKFORCE The America of the golden age had been dominated by men and machines.

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

She wasn’t looking for job security—at least not yet. Still, I had to imagine that at some point she would want—and need—the assurance that she could continue to do what she loved without risking her financial well-being. In her old life, this woman had been what the late Peter Drucker called a “knowledge worker.” She’d gotten a good education and scored a job in high-level information with a reputable agency of the federal government.2 And she ended up hating it. The key to her professional happiness, she realized, was not in applying the knowledge she had learned in school but in using her innate creative abilities.

…

Chapter 7 1 Dan Pink, Free Agent Nation, Warner Books, 2001. 2 Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, Harper Business, 1993; Drucker, “Beyond the Information Revolution,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1999, pp. 47-57; Drucker, “The Next Society,” The Economist, November 1, 2001, pp. 1-20. Fritz Machlup is often credited with the term “knowledge worker” from his 1962 book The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, Princeton University Press, 1962. 3 See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books, 2002. Data updated by Kevin Stolarick. 4 “The World’s Richest People,” Forbes, March 8, 2007. 5 Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, “Inside the Black Box of Economic Development: Human Capital, the Creative Class, and Tolerance,” Journal of Economic Geography, 8, 5, 2008. 6 The correlations between occupation and per capita income are as follows: computer and math (.659); business and finance (.549); arts, entertainment, and media (.511); sales (.480); engineering and architecture (.472); science (.393); law (.390); and management (.358). 7 The correlations with regional income are as follows: health care occupations (.052); education occupations (.055). 8 See for example, Alfred Weber, Theory of the Location of Industries, University of Chicago Press, 1929 (1st ed., 1909). 9 Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide, Basic Books, 1984. 10 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, Cosimo Classics, abridged ed., 2006 (1st ed., 1890). 11 Michael Porter, “Clusters and the New Economics of Competition,” Harvard Business Review, November-December 1998; Porter, “Location, Clusters, and Company Strategy,” in Gordon Clark, Meric Gertler, and Mayrann Feldman, eds., Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, 2000; and Porter, “Location, Competition, and Economic Development: Local Clusters in a Global Economy,” Economic Development Quarterly 14, 1, February 2000, pp. 15-34. 12 Joseph Cortright and Heike Mayer, Signs of Life: The Growth of Biotechnology Centers in the US, Brookings Institution, Center for Metropolitan Policy, 2001. 13 Pui-Wing Tam, “New Hot Spot for High Tech Firms Is the Old One,” Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2006. 14 Ann Markusen and Greg Schrock, “The Distinctive City: Divergent Patterns in Growth, Hierarchy, and Specialization,” Urban Studies 43, 8, July 2006, pp. 1301-1323. 15 Maryann Feldman and Roger Martin, “Jurisdictional Advantage,” National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2004. 16 Dan Fitzpatrick, “Extreme Commuters at PNC Raise Eyebrows,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 7, 2005. 17 Robert D.

…

See Initial public offering Irrational Exuberance (Shiller) Israel Italy Ithaca, New York Jackson, Scott Jacobs, Jane Jagger, Mick Japan super-megaregions and Jihad Jobs, Steve Johns Hopkins University Jolliffe, Lynn Journal of Economic Literature Jurisdictional advantage Kahneman, Daniel Katsuyama Kefentse, Kwende Kenney, Martin Kingston, Ontario Knight Frank Knowledge workers Kodak Kuala Lumpur Lang, Robert Lansing, Michigan Las Vegas Latin America Leadership place choice and Leamer, Edward Leave It to Beaver (television series) Led Zeppelin Leeds Leonhardt, David Lexington Life decisions stages in Life partners Light-based regional product (LRP) Lisbon(fig.)

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

From within organizations come sounds of fighting between the IT (information technology) and HR (human resources) factions over who "owns" knowledge management. 2 Similarly, technology giants have entered a propaganda war over who best understands knowledge.3 Elsewhere, the management consultants are maneuvering for high ground in the knowledge stakes. In the process, knowledge has gained sufficient momentum to push aside not only concepts like reengineering but also information, whose rule had previously looked so secure. To be, in Peter Drucker's term, a "knowledge worker" now seems much more respectable than being a mere "information worker," though for a while the latter seemed very much the thing to be. Similarly, pundits are pushing "information economy" and the venerable ''information age" aside in the name of the more Page 119 voguish "knowledge economy" and "knowledge age."

…

Similarly, the sort of blind downsizing produced by business process reengineering has caused organizations to lose "collective memory."7 It's impossible to assess the value of such layoffs. But the business journalist Thomas Stewart estimated the cost of AT&T's last round as equivalent to an $8 billion capital write-off.8 In all, the job of knowledge management cannot involve just the protection and exploitation of patents. It must include the cultivation of knowledgeable workers. Focusing on information, however, makes this kind of cultivation difficult. Known Problems Curiously, if knowledge will go out of the door in the heads of people who have developed and worked with that knowledge, it seems reluctant to go out (or stay behind) in the heads of people Page 123 who have not been so involved.

…

The maxim "Forget all you know" doesn't show much interest in accrued human capital. 17. Walsh and Bayma, 1995. 18. Orr, 1996. 19. As the workplace sociologist Stephen Barley (1996) of Stanford Page 268 University argues, these reps are in many ways models of the new knowledge worker. They work alone, with sophisticated technology, supported by extensive information resources. 20. Hammer also briefly discusses tech reps, but he gives little sense of how they develop understanding or deal with the unexpected. He primarily affirms that reengineering helps them. Hammer, 1996, pp. 26 28. 21.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

We’re accustomed to thinking of management as the application of business school techniques that carry a scientific sheen: uniform measurements of productivity and metrics of return-on-investment. Drucker’s definition sounds awfully squishy; he could be talking about an orchestra conductor or a stage director. But in emphasizing the art of management over the science, the human realm over the quantitative dimension, Drucker—who first invented the term knowledge worker and then offered invaluable insights into its implications—was trying to remind us that numbers are only a starting point for management, not its ultimate goal. One great irony inherent in the management of software projects is that despite the digital precision of the materials programmers work with, the enterprise of writing software is uniquely resistant to measurement.

…

And, of course, when a project team’s work is unpredictable, the entire project is unpredictable. In short, as long as individual developers do not plan and track their personal work, their projects will be uncontrollable and unmanageable.” On the other hand, here is Peter Drucker, the father of contemporary management studies: “Most discussions of the knowledge worker’s task start with the advice to plan one’s work. This sounds eminently plausible. The only thing wrong with it is that it rarely works. The plans always remain on paper, always remain good intentions. They seldom turn into achievement.” Drucker published those words in 1966. As it happened, that was just about the time that a young Watts Humphrey was taking over the reins of software management at IBM.

…

Chandler sat at an unusual midpoint between these approaches, leaving it without clear signposts to mark the moment of “done” or even to indicate the direction in which completion might lie. But there is another consequence of software development’s halting problem, one that is less pragmatic than existential. David Allen, the Getting Things Done guru, talked about the “gnawing sense of anxiety” suffered by knowledge workers who face mountains of open-ended tasks. Software developers always have more to do; the definition of “done,” even for an interim release or small milestone, is always somewhat arbitrary. In this their work is more like an author’s than a builder’s. “Done” isn’t something that is obvious to an observer.

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

And the nature of what we do and how we do it has been completely transformed in less than a century: We’ve morphed as a civilization from the hard physical labor of rural agricultural work to the sedentary chair sitting of urban knowledge workers. That’s a far more stressful life. “Think about the farmer,” Akil tells me. “The farmer can’t control and predict very much either. So why is that any better or worse than being on Wall Street? As a farmer, if there was a freeze that destroyed your crops, that might’ve stressed you, but it wasn’t your fault. But as a knowledge worker, you’re expected to be in charge of everything. And when things go wrong, it is your fault. The thinking is, you could have planned more, or you should have anticipated what went wrong.

…

When Ford cut hours, errors went down, efficiency, productivity, and employee satisfaction went up, as did the company’s profits. He shuttered factories on Saturdays in 1926 for the same reason, and the forty-hour workweek, enshrined in federal law since 1938, was born. But times and work have changed. Unlike manual laborers, knowledge workers have about six good hours of hard mental labor a day, futurist Sara Robinson found in a review of research on work and work hours. Work late for too long, she wrote, and “people get dull and stupid … They make mistakes that they’d never make if they were rested; and fixing those mistakes takes longer because they’re fried.”15 A study of medical interns found that those on long shifts made 36 percent more potentially serious errors than those who worked shorter shifts.16 Research by the Business Roundtable in the 1980s found that companies can get short-term gains by pushing employees to work sixty or seventy hours a week, Robinson reports.

…

As a working mother friend of mine said, “If there are on-ramps back into the workplace for disgraced politicians like Eliot Spitzer, then why not for parents?” • Understand the neuroscience of how humans work best: pulsing between periods of intense concentration of typically no more than ninety mintues, and breaks to completely change the channel. • Embrace the restorative power of vacation. Allow knowledge workers to daydream or noodle around with an idea without fear of failure. • Draw on the science of human motivation first by giving workers a fair salary and benefits, then allowing them to have greater autonomy, a sense of purpose, and the ability to become masterful at what they do. • Working in a new way does not mean working less.

Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough by Sendhil Mullainathan

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive load, computer vision, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, happiness index / gross national happiness, impulse control, indoor plumbing, inventory management, knowledge worker, late fees, linear programming, mental accounting, microcredit, p-value, payday loans, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

firefighting organizations have several features in common: We owe our understanding of firefighting and several of the examples to Roger E. Bohn and Ramchandran Jaikumar, Firefighting by Knowledge Workers (Information Storage Industry Center, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, 2000). “If you look at our resource allocation on traditional projects”: N. P. Repenning, “Reducing Cycle Time at Ford Electronics, Part II: Improving Product Development,” case study available from the author (1996). 28,000 known bugs: This number is cited in Bohn and Jaikumar, Firefighting by Knowledge Workers. It is actually part of a larger controversy about whether or not Microsoft shipped with 61,000 known bugs.

…

present bias: A nice overview of present bias and other models of time discounting can be found in Shane Frederick and George Loewenstein, “Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review,” Journal of Economic Literature (2002). Because machine uptime was important: R. E. Bohn and R. Jaikumar, Firefighting by Knowledge Workers (Information Storage Industry Center, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, 2000), retrieved from http://isic.ucsd.edu/pdf/firefighting.pdf. Steven Covey finds it helpful to classify tasks: S. R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Free Press, 2004).

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

The truth of my real, lived life lies somewhere in between what’s pictured and what’s intended. But there’s a reason I sometimes find myself scrolling through my own account as I fight that before-sleep anxiety: When I don’t feel connected to myself or my life, Instagram reminds me of who I’ve decided I am. For knowledge workers, a well-curated Instagram, like a popular Twitter presence, can be a gateway to a job, or #sponcon. The purest example of this concept is the social media influencer, whose entire income source is performing and mediating the self online. Most people’s lives aren’t so explicitly monetizable, but that doesn’t mean they’re not cultivating a brand to project to the larger world.

…

If you can make a hundred widgets in less time, that doesn’t mean everyone should work less—instead, they should work the same number of hours and make more widgets. But part of it, too, had to do with the rise of a different sort of work, “knowledge work,” with a different sort of widget. Knowledge workers have “outcomes” and “products,” but unlike a factory product, they were difficult to measure. As a result, these workers are salaried, as in, paid for the entire year instead of by the hour. During the Great Compression era, most salaried workers still worked a forty-hour week, but without the rigidity of clocking in or out—and, depending on your contract, a legal demand to pay overtime.

…

“On any given night in America, exhausted parents and New Year’s–resolution cooks were unpacking identical cardboard boxes shipped by meal-prep startups, disposing of identical piles of plastic packaging, and sitting down to identical dishes,” she writes. “Homogeneity was a small price to pay for the erasure of decision fatigue. It liberated our minds to pursue other endeavors, like work.”4 One result of this drive for productivity is a new hierarchy of labor: On the top end, there are salaried, hyperproductive knowledge workers. Below, there are the people who perform the “mundane” tasks that make that productivity possible: nannies, TaskRabbits, Uber Eats drivers, house cleaners, personal organizers, Trunk Club stylists, Blue Apron packagers, Amazon warehouse workers and drivers, FreshDirect shoppers. Rich people have always had servants.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

While the companies who pay the minimum possible wage and nickel and dime their employees may make a quick buck, they rarely seem to last. In Summary (a.k.a. TL;DR) Improved education standards are taking the implementation of existing best practices and globalizing them. Improved communication technology has made it easy for individuals and companies to find, hire, and manage not just industrial workers, but knowledge workers. The number of individuals looking for jobs, hoping to follow someone else’s orders, are growing exponentially. Could your job theoretically be done over an internet connection and phone line? Yet, your job being outsourced isn’t the only threat at hand. Even as globalization moves knowledge jobs overseas, there’s increasing pressure at home.

…

We think of acquiring knowledge or skills—like product management or sales or marketing—as resources, but we still don’t think of entrepreneurship that way. Right now, there’s no way to measure entrepreneurship. No one would ever write “two years’ experience in entrepreneurship” on their resume. If we imagine a knowledge worker trying to invest in entrepreneurship, there are clear paths to moving from doing knowledge work to doing entrepreneurial work. The chart is admittedly grossly oversimplified and based on a zero sum system indicating the amount each role operates in knowledge work as opposed entrepreneurship.

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late by Michael Ellsberg

affirmative action, Black Swan, Burning Man, corporate governance, creative destruction, do what you love, financial engineering, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, hiring and firing, independent contractor, job automation, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, mega-rich, meta-analysis, new economy, Norman Mailer, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social intelligence, solopreneur, Steve Ballmer, survivorship bias, telemarketer, Tony Hsieh

These people, young and old, read books like The Four-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss, Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur by Pamela Slim, and Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love by Jonathan Fields. Daniel Pink, in Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself, his 2001 book prophesying the current tidal wave of microentrepreneurialism, small business, and self-employment, calls them “self-employed knowledge workers, proprietors of home-based businesses . . . freelancers and e-lancers, independent contractors and independent professionals, micropreneurs and infopreneurs, part-time consultants . . . on-call troubleshooters, and full-time soloists.”9 These new kinds of opportunities, open to anyone who wants to pursue them, without any formal, traditional, or academic qualifications necessary to compete, have arisen largely because of technology.

…

Laborers earned their money by receiving a sliver of the enormous rewards those giant machines produced.”10 Pink argues that in the last decade, in one area of the economy—called “knowledge work”—a shift has occurred as massive and with implications as far-reaching as those during the shift from an agrarian to an industrial society. For knowledge workers in the developed world, the tools of their trade have become so ridiculously cheap that the “means of production” have once again become affordable to individual workers. These workers no longer have to depend on bosses or large organizations to furnish them with the means of production. They can quit the factory-style organizations and become “butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers” once again—that is, digitally connected entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs.

…

See Meaningful work, creating Ilovemarketing.com Institute for Integrative Nutrition Intelligence, practical versus academic Internet marketing guru online presence, building and self-created business and self-education YourName.com, importance of Investments, bootstrapper’s method IQ, and success IronPort Iteration velocity John Paul Mitchell Systems Johnson, Cameron as college non-graduate success, evolution of Jong, Erica Kaufman, Josh Kawasaki, Guy Keillor, Garrison Kennedy, Dan as college non-graduate direct-response marketing Kerkorkian, Kirk Kern, Frank as college non-graduate direct-response marketing on power of selling success, evolution of Kiyosaki, Robert mentor of on power of selling Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Knowledge workers, digital Marxism Komisar, Randy on safety versus risk La Flamme, Jena Cheng sales coaching as college non-graduate Deida relationship training direct-response marketing, use of success, evolution of Lalla, Annie and Eben Pagan Langan, Chris LaPorte, Danielle, success, evolution of Laugh-O-Gram Leadership definitions of and impact on many as new marketing as skill of success Lean Startup Machine Lerer, Ben Levchin, Max Leve, Brett Lifelong learning Linchpin concept Listening, importance of Loucks, Vernon Louis Marx and Company Luck, and success Lupton, Amber Lynda Limited McDermid, Hitch Mailer, Norman Maister, David Making a difference.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

But it did occur to me that there was a lot more money in bullshit than there had ever been in bulls and I would get into information. And here I am.69 Barlow’s shift from agricultural work to information work was abrupt, painful, and involuntary. “I did try my personal best to resist conscription as a Knowledge Worker,” he writes, “but I was as culturally doomed as the Tasaday of New Guinea. . . . Yanked from the 19th Century, I found myself . . . tossed unceremoniously onto the doorstep of the 21st.”70 For Barlow, this meant reaching out to his old friends in San Francisco. In 1986, while still in Pinedale, Barlow heard that David Gans, a Bay area disc jockey and connoisseur of the Grateful Dead, and hundreds of other Dead V i r t u a l i t y an d C o m m u n i t y o n t h e W E L L [ 167 ] Heads, were conversing on the WELL.

…

It’s the ultimate goal of building companies around networked computers, mobile communications, and self-managed teams: to marry the competitive demands of business with the desire for personal satisfaction and democratic participation; to achieve productive coordination without top-down control.” In the pages of Out of Control, the Long Hunter of the Whole Earth Catalog had become an entrepreneur. Journalists picked up on the point too. “The renegade competitor,” wrote the Harvard Business Review, “the lone knowledge worker equipped with a laptop, a modem, and an inspired idea—these are our heroes, the change agents who are reinventing industries, reshaping the economy, creating vast wealth.”63 Almost thirty years earlier, thousands of young, highly educated Americans had tromped off into the wilderness seeking to build an egalitarian, fun-loving world.

…

In Control Revolution, Beniger traced to the late nineteenth century the increasing importance of information to economic life. James W. Cortada, in Making of the Information Society, has recently argued that information has been a key feature of Western and particularly American culture for N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 4 1 _ 2 5 3 [ 289 ] hundreds of years. For similar arguments on the knowledge worker, see Chandler and Cortada, Nation Transformed by Information. Scholars of a Marxist orientation have been particularly aggressive in challenging the notion that the postindustrial, postmodern, or network society models actually represent a new era in capitalism. For critiques in this vein, see Slack and Fejes, Ideology of the Information Age; Lyon, Information Society; and Garnham, “Information Society Theory as Ideology.”

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

The predictions that can be extracted from data will increasingly be used to substitute for human qualities such as experience and judgment. As top managers increasingly employ data-driven decision making powered by automated tools, there will be an ever-shrinking need for an extensive human analytic and management infrastructure. Whereas today there is a team of knowledge workers who collect information and present analysis to multiple levels of management, eventually there may be a single manager and a powerful algorithm. Organizations are likely to flatten. Layers of middle management will evaporate, and many of the jobs now performed by both clerical workers and skilled analysts will simply disappear.

…

Watson—as well as the competing systems that are certain to eventually appear—have the potential to revolutionize the way questions are asked and answered, as well as the way information analysis is approached, both internal to organizations and in engagements with customers. There is no escaping the reality, however, that a great deal of the analysis performed by systems of this type would otherwise have been done by human knowledge workers. Building Blocks in the Cloud In November 2013, IBM announced that its Watson system would move from the specialized computers that hosted the system for the Jeopardy! matches to the cloud. In other words, Watson would now reside in massive collections of servers connected to the Internet.

…

Even within these top-tier households, income is concentrated to a staggering degree; the number of genuinely wealthy households—those that can survive and continue spending entirely on the basis of their accumulated wealth—is far smaller. During the first year of recovery from the Great Recession, 95 percent of income growth went to just the top 1 percent.20 The top 5 percent is largely made up of professionals and knowledge workers with at least a college degree. As we saw in Chapter 4, however, many of these skilled occupations are squarely in the crosshairs as technology advances. Software automation may eliminate some jobs entirely. In other cases, the jobs may end up being deskilled, so that wages are driven down. Offshoring and the transition to big data–driven management approaches that often require fewer analysts and middle managers loom as other potential threats for many of these workers.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, knowledge worker, the map is not the territory, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

--and to Kay Swim and her son, Gaylord, for their much appreciated vision which contributed to our organization's rapid growth. FOREWORD The world has changed dramatically since The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was first published. Life is more complex, more stressful, more demanding. We have transitioned from the Industrial Age into the Information Knowledge Worker Age - with all of its profound consequences. We face challenges and problems in our personal lives, our families, and our organizations unimagined even one and two decades ago. These challenges are not only of a new order of magnitude, they are altogether different in kind. These sweeping changes in society and rumbling shifts in the digitized global marketplace give rise to a very important question - one I'm asked fairly often: "Are The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People still relevant today?"

…

Of course we try to appear generous and cheer for others' successes, but inwardly, privately, so many of us are eating our hearts out when others achieve. Many of the great things in the history of our civilization have been achieved by the independent will of a determined soul. But the greatest opportunities and boundless accomplishments of the Knowledge Worker Age are reserved for those who master the art of "we." True greatness will be achieved through the abundant mind that works selflessly - with mutual respect,for mutual benefit. The hunger to be understood. Few needs of the human heart are greater than the need to be understood - to have a voice that is heard, respected, and valued - to have influence.

…

Tapping into the higher reaches of human genius and motivation--what we could call voice--requires a new mindset, a new skill-set, a new tool-set ... a new habit. The 8th Habit, then, is not about adding one more habit to the 7th--one that somehow got forgotten. It's about seeing and harnessing the power of a third dimension to the 7 Habits that meets the central challenge of the new Knowledge Worker Age. How does notoriety affect you? It affects me in different ways. From an ego standpoint, it's flattering. From a teaching standpoint it is humbling, but I must strongly acknowledge that I am not the author of any of these principles and deserve absolutely no recognition. I am not saying this because of a desire to be modest and humble.

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less by Michael Hyatt

Atul Gawande, Cal Newport, Checklist Manifesto, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lock screen, microdosing, Parkinson's law, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, side hustle, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

By limiting employee discretion and freedom, Taylor effectively turned them into manufacturing robots. Taylor died more than a hundred years ago, but we’re still trying to follow the same basic efficiency model: working a lot of hours and doing as many tasks as possible as quickly as we can. The problem is most of us aren’t factory workers; we’re knowledge workers. We’re hired more for our mental output than our physical labor. As such, we often have tremendous discretion over our time and a great deal of autonomy as we go about our daily tasks. While twentieth-century factory workers did the same set of tasks all day every day throughout the week, we are constantly surprised by new challenges, opportunities, and problems.

…

., 67 Hardy, Benjamin, 218 Hastings, Reed, 71 health, 228 Heinemeier, David, 164 hobbies, 41, 79, 228 Holland, Barbara, 71 Ideal Week, 119, 162, 172–81, 226 Ideal Week template, 182 I Love Lucy (TV program), 25–26 impairment, 70 Information Economy, 13 innovation, and changing environment, 72 instant communication, 207–11 instant-gratification culture, 84 interruptions, 207–11, 226 Isolator, 205–6, 212 Jobs, Steve, 111 Johnson, Paul, 81–82 Jones, Charlie “Tremendous”, 50 journaling, 220 karoshi (death by overwork), 32 Kennedy, John F., 71 King, Stephen, 223 knowledge workers, 28 Koch, Jim, 200, 202 Lewis, Penelope A., 70 liberating truths, 59–63 lifestyle objectives, 38 limiting beliefs, 59–63 “loss of separation,” 184 lunch, 72 MacArthur, Douglas, 71 McCartney, Paul, 99 McKeown, Greg, 183 macro-processing software, 131–32 maintenance, 168, 169 margin, 33, 36, 52, 111, 157, 224, 225, 226 meals, and building relationships, 74 meetings, 197 MegaBatching, 162, 163–66, 172, 180–81 mental health, 83 mentoring, 153 Michel, Alexandra, 65–66 Michelangelo, 21, 100 micro-breaks, 82–83 micromanagers, 149 Miller, Megan Hyatt, 54 mindset, 54 Minor, Dylan, 78 morning ritual, 119 Mortimer, Ian, 223 movement (exercise), 74–77, 195 multitasking, 161–62, 212 music, 217 musicians, 46 Musk, Elon, 67–68 Naish, John, 161, 212 naps, 71 Nashville, 46 natural foods, 73 nature, 82–83 necessary routines, 147–48 Netflix, 71 Newport, Cal, 161–62, 164 Not-to-Do List, 93, 99–100, 113 Nozbe, 202 nutrition, 73 nutritional supplement protocol, 73 offloading tasks, 138, 225–26 Off Stage, 166, 170, 173, 176, 195 OneNote, 127 Opipari, Ben, 75 outdoors, 82–83 overgrowth.

Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere by Tsedal Neeley

Airbnb, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discrete time, Donald Trump, future of work, global pandemic, iterative process, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lockdown, mass immigration, natural language processing, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Silicon Valley, social distancing

Another study designed to capture the lived experience and consequences of working from home compared to the office found that employees did better on creative problem-solving tasks when working from home. If we leave out the high-touch jobs such as hair salons or tattoo parlors, many jobs thrive in a remote format—especially those that require deep problem-solving and undistracted concentration. Software engineers, graphic designers, editors, writers, or other knowledge workers who can do most of their work at a computer fit this category. Success from Anywhere: Be Productive Virtually Focus on process and not outcome when assessing productivity. Equip your teams with the tools and resources they need and assume that they will have the insights into how best to achieve their work goals.

…

See face-to-face interactions instant messaging systems communication and, 65, 77, 105 cultural differences and, 79 emails replaced by, 62 social dynamics influenced by, 64 as synchronous media, 71 instructing, mutual teaching, 126–27 interaction norms of agile remote teams, 100–101, 105, 108 of collocated teams, 13, 85, 99–100 inclusive conversations in global team meetings, 121–24 information interactions, 144–45 isolation and, 14–15 planning ongoing communication, 11–13 psychological safety, 13–14 as teamwork element, 5, 9–15, 17 interdependence across teams, 7 internal social media tools agile remote teams and, 100–101 digital tools and, 65, 79–83, 84 emails replaced by, 62 leaders and, 82–83 nonwork exchanges and, 81–83, 84 permanence of, 63 trust and, 19–20, 22, 32, 33, 79–80, 82 intimacy digital tools for, 65 social presence problem and, 68–69, 84 isolation interaction norms and, 14–15 leaders’ role in, 14–15, 142 of remote work format, xiv, 42 team cohesion and, 56–57 Jobs, Steve, 6 JPMorgan Chase, xii–xiii Judge, Mike, 85 Khan, Tariq, 111–14, 116, 119–20, 139–40 knowledge direct knowledge, 29, 30, 32, 38 internal social media tools and, 80, 82 mutual knowledge problem, 64, 65–67, 84 reflected knowledge, 30, 31–32, 38 trust promoted by, 29–32, 38 knowledge workers, 58 Krinsky, Dave, 85 Larson, Barbara, 49 launch sessions. See also relaunch sessions action exercises, 174–76 for agile remote teams, 107–8 alignment as goal of, 5 contributions and constraints, 7–8 as dialogue, 6–7 interaction norms and, 5, 9–15, 17 leadership commitment, 15–17 length of, 4 planning and, 3–4 resources and, 5, 8–9 shared goals and, 4, 6–7, 17 leaders and leadership action exercises, 186–87 behaviors and best practices for, xvi class divide challenge, 134, 136–38, 148 common purpose and, 148 communication of, 62, 142–43 country-of-origin effect and, 159–60 creating structure, 149 cross-cultural mutual adaptation, 120, 121, 124–28 defining remote work leadership, 133–35 digital tools and, 83, 142 early warning signs and, 131, 135, 162 employee motivation and, xiv engagement challenge, 134, 144–48, 149 framing the situation, 153, 156, 160–63, 164, 172 generating solutions with diverse minds, 163–67, 168, 169 Global Leadership Aptitude, 156 group-level identity and, 148 inclusive conversations in global team meetings, 121–24 individual contributions and constraints, 7–8 interaction norms and, 14–15 internal social media tools and, 82–83 location challenge, 134, 135–36, 201n panoramic awareness, 156–58, 161, 172 performance feedback challenge, 134, 143, 149 predictability challenge, 134, 142–43, 149 presence and, 131, 133–34, 142, 147 productive conflict and, 144, 146–47, 149 responses to global crises, xv, 152, 156, 167–72 role of, 132 surveillance for productivity and, 43 team goals and, 58–59 teamwork elements, 15–17 “us versus them” challenge, 134, 138–42 LEGO, 90 Leonardi, Paul, 81, 95 Liang, James, 48 linguistic differences code-switching, 123, 129 English as lingua franca, 118–19 everyone balances for inclusion, 123–24, 129 faultlines and, 138, 140 fluent speakers dial down dominance, 121–22, 128 global teams and, 110, 111, 113, 114, 117–24, 128–29 inclusive conversations in meetings, 121–24 language fluency confused with competency, 119 less fluent speakers dial up engagement, 122–23, 128–29 psychological distance and, 116, 117, 118, 123 rules of engagement, 119, 124 location challenge, in leadership, 134, 135–36, 201n loneliness, 56–57.

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, commoditize, knowledge worker, Republic of Letters

– Mathematics is to knowledge what an artificial hand is to the real one; some amputate to replace. – Modernity inflicts a sucker narrative on activities; now we “walk for exercise,” not “walk” with no justification; for hidden reasons. – Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, knowledge workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren’t scientific at all. – For so many, instead of looking for “cause of death” when they expire, we should be looking for “cause of life” when they are still around. – It is those who use others who are the most upset when someone uses them. – If someone gives you more than one reason why he wants the job, don’t hire him

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

On the one hand, highly paid scientists with doctorates; on the other, lower-paid support staff – and little demand for mid-pay workers between these two extremes.80 All this points to the changing topology of employment in the Exponential Age. This is an economy where intangible assets – the kind produced by well-educated knowledge-workers – are all-important. Those with high levels of education are compensated handsomely. At the same time, there remains a group of less well-rewarded, less highly skilled workers, who may not even be acknowledged as employees. In aggregate, the result is a reduced share of income that goes to employees.

…

As we progress through the Exponential Age, cities will become more important, not less. The key cause is, once again, the rise of the intangible economy – and the effect it has on labour markets. Value in this intangible economy is created through highly complex products. Today, highly skilled knowledge workers are more in demand than ever. And these types of workers have never been evenly spread across a country. They cluster around physical institutions, namely universities, and the labs and resources they provide. And around those universities grow companies that employ the most-skilled individuals.

…

And these firms have capabilities that even governments need to rely on. Such companies increasingly dominate aspects of society we have never thought of as the province of firms. But it is not just companies that are becoming more powerful. Unaccountable influence goes to the individuals and places – high-tech knowledge-workers, cyber criminals, malevolent states – that first understood the power of exponential technology. The notion of the exponential gap is one attempt to synthesise each of these forces. All of them hint at a world changing faster than our systems and assumptions can handle. And any of these forces might lead us to dystopia.

Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

When more and more people are assigned to conceptualise rather than execute work processes, capital must economise this labour force too. The same tight regime is imposed on engineers and programmers as has previously been, with their help, forced upon blue-collar workers.72 At this point, however, Taylorism runs into its own limits. There is no easy way to deprive ‘knowledge workers’ of knowledge and still have them working. One unexpected outcome from the mechanisation of the office is that the opportunities for hacking and sabotage abounds. A high-profile case of employee hacking occurred in 1996 when Timothy Lloyed discovered that he was going to be fired from Omega Engineering.

…

. […] If it had a new technology available at the processor level that would allow computer users to do new things, it had to wait until the operating system supplier decided it was willing to build support for these features into the system.” (Young, 6). 53. Martin Kenney “Value Creation in the Late Twentieth Century: The Rise of the Knowledge Worker” in ed. Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl and Michael Stack, Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capitalism and Social Revolution (London: Verso, 1997), 91; hereafter cited in text. 54. Rebecca Eisenberg, “Genes Patents and Product Development”, Science 14 (August 1992). 55. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 50; hereafter cited in text. 56.

…

Mariarosa Dalla Costa & Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol: The Falling Wall Press, 1973). Harriet Fraad, Stephen Resnick & Richard Wolff, Bringing it all Back Home—Class, Gender and Power in the Modern Household (London: Pluto Press, 1994). 43. Martin Kenney “Value Creation in the Late Twentieth Century: The Rise of the Knowledge Worker” in (Davis, Hirschl & Stack 94). 44. Eric von Hippel, professor in economics at MIT, studies how end users contribute to innovation. He is positive about the trend and stresses that users can design equipment closer to their needs than if they depend on the guesses of a manufacturer. Eric von Hippel acknowledges that the reluctance among many companies towards enrolling user-centred innovation schemes owes to the perceived threat to the social division of labour.

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Consider the wide range of factors implicated in the growing economic divide between the highly skilled (or, roughly speaking, the college educated) and everybody else. Skill-biased technological change, for instance, means that information technology serves as a valuable complement for skilled “knowledge workers” while substituting for less-skilled manual and clerical workers. The slowdown in the growth of workers’ average years of schooling completed means that the relative supply of skilled workers lags behind relative demand. Mass immigration expands the ranks of low-skill workers even as demand for them has flagged.

…

In the rapidly growing information technology sector, the presence of strong network effects in information technology guarantees that some industries will feature “winner take all” markets with high levels of concentration. Lobbyists for strong copyright and patent protection for software have further amplified this dynamic by fortifying the winners’ market power with additional barriers to entry. Meanwhile, network effects have also led to geographic concentration, as highly skilled knowledge workers are increasingly congregating together in “human capital hubs.” As a result, a few big coastal cities have come to account for an outsized share of the nation’s productive capacity, as well as its opportunities for upward mobility. Homeowners in those cities would have profited handsomely in any event, but they have multiplied their winnings by pulling up the drawbridge with increasingly restrictive land-use regulations, The opportunistic parasitism of regressive rent-seeking has hit the twenty-first-century American economy at its most vulnerable points—namely, its twin susceptibilities to slowing growth and rising inequality.

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski, Peter Krapp

Apollo 11, business process, Charles Babbage, continuation of politics by other means, double entry bookkeeping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, index card, Index librorum prohibitorum, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jacques de Vaucanson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge worker, means of production, new economy, paper trading, Turing machine, work culture

(From Bührer and Saager 1912, p. 4.) May 1911 sees the publication of The Organization of Mental Labor by “The Bridge,” by Karl Wilhelm Bührer and Adolf Saager. The authors’ aim is unequivocal. “The principal purpose of our book was to win Ostwald for our cause”—namely, as a promising financier and mediator for knowledge workers.48 Encouraged by having read Wilhelm Ostwald’s book Energetic Bases of Cultural Studies, the journalist Saager succeeds in translating Bührer’s ideas, despite communicative difficulties, into a joint text, and to establish contact with Ostwald.49 In spring 1911, Saager sends printer’s proofs to Ostwald’s country house in Groß-Bothen.50 Ostwald responds Transatlantic Technology Transfer 117 immediately; they meet and found The Bridge as an International Institute for the Organization of Mental Labor.

…

Its organizational innovation movement pursues two strategic purposes: (1) An “archive that will introduce a comprehensive illustrated world encyclopedia on single sheets of uniform format.” At first, world knowledge is to be put down by professionals on standardized slips of paper and kept in standard boxes in a world format.60 (2) A “collection of addresses, containing the addresses of all living knowledge workers.”61 Furthermore, they aim to gather pointers to knowledge, which by virtue of their own addressing logic lead to new information. Maybe the ads for Library Bureau and the organizational achievements they promise encourage a belief that with the help of a suitable apparatus and thanks to the considerable time savings that ensue, everything can be stored.62 Operating an index card box tempts people to develop a euphoria of totality—and not only the The Bridge members.

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bluma Zeigarnik, Cal Newport, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, functional fixedness, game design, imposter syndrome, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Parkinson's law, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, side hustle, SimCity, Skype, TED Talk, twin studies, Zipcar

Check for new messages only if you have the time, attention, and energy to deal with whatever might have come in. This is a simple trigger that lets you make sure you can actually deal with new messages, instead of getting stressed by the new stuff to which you have to respond. Keep a tally of how often you check for messages. The average knowledge worker checks his email eleven times per hour—eighty-eight times over the span of a day. It’s hard to get any real work done with so many interruptions. The same study found that employees spend an average of just around thirty-five minutes on email per day—which means that email consumes much more attention than it does actual time.

…

While it would be impossible to get rid of email completely, try the tactics above and experiment with what works best for you. Meetings After email, meetings are one of the biggest distractions we face throughout the day. They also consume an inordinate amount of time. A recent study found that, on average, knowledge workers spend 37 percent of their time in meetings—which means that if you work an eight-hour day, you typically spend three hours daily in meetings. Meetings are remarkably costly—gather even a small group of people in a conference room for an hour, and you can easily lose an entire day’s worth of work.

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid by Franck Frommer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, business continuity plan, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, disinformation, hypertext link, invention of writing, inventory management, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, new economy, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, union organizing

There is an underlying shift from ‘rational legal’ authority, based on the attribution of roles through rules, toward an authority of experts over other experts defined by their actions in the production process: one is judged not on status but by what one does. . . . The place and number of “knowledge workers” or “professional managers” . . . who are defined by their own work, not by supervising the work of others, is growing at the expense of middle management who seem to be the unproductive personnel in the organization of knowledge.22 Thus the sharing of information—still a major question of power for the hierarchy in some companies—in ordinary work meetings has been completely changed by the contribution of new tools fostering collective creation, exchange, collaboration, and debate.

…

See landscape format; slides: format How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie), 23 human capital, 191, 212 human relations, 140 human resources, 175–80, 186, 188 Hussein, Saddam, 154 IBM, 9 illustration, 92–99 animation, 98 distracts students, 203 clip art, 97 polysemy, 93–95 teachers, 214–15 See also diagrams and graphs An Inconvenient Truth (Gore), 73, 118–24 Apple Macintosh, 120 awards and ticket sales, 119 biographical details, 121 information distraction, 226–27 processing, 10–12, 29 society, 126, 217, 227 Internet Gore, 120 military imagery, 157 Powell’s PowerPoint, 155 schools, 217 search engines, 65 security, 20 teachers and templates, 214–15 use in higher education, 199 iPad, iPhone, and iPod, 116–17, 226 Iran, 158, 161 Iraq, 154–55, 161–64 Israel, 161 Jaffe, Greg, 162 Jeanneret, Yves, 107 Jobs, Steve, 112–18, 227 Macworld Conference Expo, 113–17 Gates videoconference, 115–16 iPod and iPhone, 116–17 The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, 117 jobs. See economization; education: employment Kawasaki, Guy, 85–86 Knoblauch, Herbert, 108, 126 knowledge society, 126–27, 227 transmission, 108–9, 126–27, 192, 205, 219 knowledge workers. See information processing Kodak, 25 landscape format, 6, 49, 78–79 See also slides: format language, 50–56, 66–75 advertising, 66–72 asyndeton, 69 ellipsis, 68 epideictic, 67 euphemism, 69–70 Anglo-influenced, 51–53 English, 53, 208 decontextualization, 55 impoverishment, 50–51, 223 indefinite article, 54 infinitive verb, 54–55, 59 Newspeak, 50–52, 70, 175, 188 nominalization, 52–53 propaganda, 66, 156, 161 quotation, 72–75 Laval, Christian, 210 layoffs.

The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford

anti-pattern, business process, c2.com, continuous integration, database schema, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, knowledge worker, Larry Wall, Paradox of Choice, Ruby on Rails, side project, type inference, web application, William of Occam

Here you will learn how to enhance your focus with specific tools and approaches to interacting with your computer, as well as ways to make your coworkers leave you alone so that you can quit banging rocks together and get some work done. The goal is to get you back to that dazed but happy state of just having scaled a virtual mountain. Kill Distractions You are a knowledge worker, meaning you are paid for the creative and innovative ideas you produce. Dealing with constant distractions, both at your desk and on your desktop, can threaten your best contributions to your projects. Developers crave a state known as flow, discussed in lots of places (it even has an entire book devoted to it, written by Csikszentmihalyi).

…

These two areas don’t support a large number of items, but using them for just a few project consolidator folders makes sense. Multiply Your Monitors Monitors have gotten cheap, and developers can use the extra real estate. It is penny-wise and dollar foolish not to supply developers with ultra-fast computers and dual monitors. Every moment that a knowledge worker stares at an hourglass is pure wasted productivity. Having to work to manage all the overlapping windows on a cramped monitor also wastes time. Multiple monitors allow you to write code on one and debug on the other. Or keep documentation alongside your coding. Having multiple monitors is just the first step, though, because you can also segregate your dual workspaces into a bunch of specialized views using virtual desktops.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Yes, there was always pressure to keep up the speed and keep down the error rate, but contrast that with today’s knowledge worker, who needs to be able to multitask, constantly learn new computer programs, and generally adapt to a fluid work flow of highly variable tasks. It’s not that our jobs have necessarily gotten harder, but the increase in variance in our everyday tasks and the fact that they require more mental concentration and cognitive skills may be quite stress-inducing. There is always a new surprise just around the corner for the knowledge worker. The boring jobs that can be delegated to computers have been. Others that can’t have been outsourced to low-wage labor markets (the famous Indian call centers), thanks to telecommunications technologies.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

Both distract from the fact that at the heart of the debate is a very real John Henry moment. In the folktale of the late nineteenth century, the mythical steel-driving man John Henry dies beating a steam-powered hammer during a competition to drill blast holes into a West Virginia mountainside. White-collar and knowledge workers now face a race against being outperformed by machines driven by artificial intelligence. In this case, AI is mainly a synonym for new levels of mainly digital productivity. Which is of course not quite as exciting as either waiting for the moment of Singularity or the advent of doom. At the same time, the reality of AI is not quite as comforting as the realization that machines, if properly handled, will always serve their masters.

…

Just like the steam hammer in John Henry’s tale, most digital tools will outperform humans at highly specialized tasks. So of course there will still be a demand for high skills and outstanding talent. No computer will ever replace a scientist, an artist, an innovator. It’s the midlevel white-collar or knowledge worker who will fall behind. As AIs’ efficiencies and skill sets increase, they also become tools of power. Surveillance, warfare, and torture are done much better by an entity not prone to emotions, conflicted values, or fatigue. Still, the danger that hostile or even lethal machines will develop an evil consciousness and turn against humankind is nil.

…

It won’t take the advent of a superior intelligence to turn abstract debates about AI into very real questions of power, values, and societal changes. Technology can initiate and advance historical shifts; it will never be the shift itself. The John Henry moment of the twenty-first century will be neither heroic nor entertaining. There are no grand gestures with which white-collar and knowledge workers can go down fighting. There will be no folk heroes dying in the office park. Today’s John Henry will merely fade into a sad statistic. Undoubtedly calculated by a skillfully thinking machine. MACHINES AREN’T INTO RELATIONSHIPS N. J. ENFIELD Senior staff scientist, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands; professor of linguistics, University of Sydney; author, The Utility of Meaning When we think of machines that think, we usually think of thinking in the pocket-calculator sense of the word.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

At the same time, on the other side of campus, Douglas Engelbart, who was a dreamer intent on using his expertise to improve the world, believed that computers should be used to “augment” or extend human capabilities, rather than to mimic or replace them. He set out to create a system to permit small groups of knowledge workers to quickly amplify their intellectual powers and work collaboratively. One researcher attempted to replace human beings with intelligent machines, while the other aimed to extend human capabilities. Of course, together, their work defined both a dichotomy and a paradox. The paradox is that the same technologies that extend the intellectual power of humans can displace them as well.

…

White-collar employment had been the engine of growth for the U.S. economy since the end of World War II, but now cracks began to appear. What were once solid white-collar jobs began disappearing. Routinized white-collar work was now clearly at risk as the economy began to recover in 2009 in the form of what was described as a “jobless recovery.” Indications were that knowledge workers’ jobs higher up in the economic pyramid were for the first time vulnerable. Economists such as MIT’s David Autor began to pick apart the specifics of the changing labor force and put forward the idea that the U.S. economy was being “hollowed out.” It might continue to grow at the bottom and the top, but middle-class jobs, essential to a modern democracy, were evaporating, he argued.

…

It had been at the heart of Doug Engelbart’s original NLS system, but as the personal computer had emerged, much of Engelbart’s broader vision had been sidelined as first Xerox PARC and then Apple and Microsoft had cherry-picked his ideas, like the mouse and hypertext, while ignoring his broader mission for an intelligence augmentation system that would facilitate small groups of knowledge workers. Gruber created a software program that automatically generated a living document of the work done by a group of people. Over a couple of weeks he sat down and built a program named Hypermail that would “live” on the same computer that was running a mail server and would generate a threaded copy of an email conversation that could be retrieved from the Web.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Anyone committed to supporting these communities must undo the damage of earlier efforts first, before being able to meaningfully engage. 15.In a study with its partner, Voluntary Association for Rural Reconstruction & Appropriate Technology, Digital Green was found to increase annual income by 68 percent, on average, from $144 a year to $242. Some households saw their incomes double. 16.It’s also possible for technology projects to build the institutional capacity required from scratch. Grameen Foundation (2014), a nonprofit I advise that seeks technological innovations for global poverty, did exactly that in its Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) project in Uganda. It identified, recruited, trained, and empowered local villagers to serve as CKWs in their communities. 17.Ramkumar (2008) includes a case study on social audits, including challenges of implementation, as written by a former MKSS member. 18.Veeraraghavan (2013). 19.

…

New York Times, Sept. 11, 1990, www.nytimes.com/1990/09/11/science/probing-school-success-of-asian-americans.html. ———. (1995). Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books. GOP Doctors Caucus. (n.d.). Health information technology, http://doctorscaucus.gingrey.house.gov/issues/issue/?IssueID=9947. Grameen Foundation. (2014). Lessons learned, 2009–2014: Community Knowledge Worker Uganda Program. Oct. 2014, http://grameenfoundation.org/sites/grameenfoundation.org/files/resources/Grameen-Foundation_CKW-Lessons-Learned-%282009-2014%29_Executive-Summary_0.pdf. Green, Elizabeth. (2014). Why do Americans stink at math? New York Times Magazine, July 23, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html.

…

See also Self-help groups Collectivism, individualism and, 93 Colombia: One Laptop Per Child, 8 Communications Arab Spring suppression of, 33–34 cyberbalkanization, 47 history of technologies, 7–8 latent desires driving habits, 40–41 management, 44–46 personal and political interaction, 46–47 telecenters, 105 texting, 25, 56, 69, 235(n33) unintended consequences, 56 See also Mobile phones; Social media Community efforts. See Collective action; Mentorship Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) project, 247(n16) Compartamos Banco (Mexico), 58–60, 66–67, 236(n7) Compassionate class, 188–191, 270(n48). See also Self-transcendence Computer literacy, 9, 17–20, 27–28, 105, 122–124 Computer programming classes, 114–115, 120–121, 125–127, 248(n25) Computers and society. See Technology and society Confucianism, 96, 214, 266(n7) Consequentialist virtue ethics, 213–214, 274–275(n4) Consumer culture, 96–97, 177–178 Consumption capacity, 82–84 Consumption smoothing, 59.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche announced a radical restructuring of his company, a symbol of German corporate conservatism, and its traditional top-down management culture. His goal was to have 60,000 employees—around 20 percent of Daimler’s global workforce—operate outside their former reporting lines and corporate silos within one year. Knowledge workers at Mercedes-Benz’s parent company weren’t laid off; they were asked to become part of a reshaped organization with flexible teams and less hierarchy. Zetsche is a tall, slim man with a background in electrical engineering. He is easy to recognize, thanks to his bushy mustache and his sense of humor.

…

Fukoku concedes that experienced employees will still have to check and approve the decisions the new system will suggest, but Fukoku is already looking into installing another machine learning system to do this double-checking. For decades, tech pundits have claimed that artificial intelligence will replace human knowledge workers. It always seemed possible, but it has rarely happened. Even routine clerical decisions at insurance companies weren’t standardized and simple enough to automate with artificial intelligence systems based on fixed rules. But artificial intelligence has evolved—from systems based on general rules to learning ones—trained on massive amounts of data.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

When discussing his favorite targets, Brown also describes the two expressions of the quintessential personality trait—often called “extraversion”—and the different attentional styles that tend to complement them. At one end of this continuum lies the introverted disposition and inward concentration typical of many “knowledge workers” drawn to the big cities where surveillance cameras abound. As Brown says, “Most of them are not really in the world. They’re just hooked into themselves, paying attention to their own thoughts and fears, as well as their cell phones, iPods, and BlackBerries. They walk very, very quickly with their eyes down diagonally, towards people’s shoes.

…

James, Henry James, William on attentional styles cognitive therapy and on improving attention Langer compared with on length of focus on rapt attention on wisdom Japan, Japanese Jefferson, Thomas Jha, Amishi Johns Hopkins Hospital Johnson, Samuel joy Jung, Carl justice Kabat-Zinn, Jon Kahneman, Daniel bounded rationality and effects of adaptation and fortune cookie maxim and Nobel Prize of personality tests and Kaiping Peng Kant, Immanuel Kaplan, Rachel Kaplan, Stephen Karney, Benjamin kindness Kine, Starlee King, Martin Luther Kismet (robot) knowledge, previous, integration of new information with knowledge workers Kohut, Heinz Langer, Ellen language Lazarus, Richard learning explicit vs. implicit of language leisure decision-making and Leonard, Elmore leverage points Levertov, Denise life, as creation of what is focused on see also meaning; quality of life Limb, Charles Listening to Prozac (Kramer) Locke, John longevity “look for the silver lining” loss risk vs.

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

The rest of America’s largest occupations are retail salespeople, cashiers, food service and prep workers, and janitors.10 Contrary to popular opinion, most of these jobs are not filled by teenagers but by adults who are trying to support themselves and their families with this work. Despite the elite’s fixation on entrepreneurship and knowledge workers, America is powered by wage-earners who punch the clock, wear uniforms, and don’t remotely have any power to “lean in” to climb the corporate ladder. For decades now we’ve been sold the idea that a growing army of knowledge workers, innovating and ideating in amenity-rich office parks, hold the key to our nation’s prosperity. Column after column written by the likes of Thomas Friedman and David Brooks argue that the future success of our economy rests on cultivating skills such as creative problem-solving and critical thinking, with a special affinity for fields in science, technology, and engineering.

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, intentional community, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

He sought to “create an environment that values and emphasizes output” and to avoid what Drucker termed the “activity trap”: “[S]tressing output is the key to increasing productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.” On an assembly line, it’s easy enough to distinguish output from activity. It gets trickier when employees are paid to think. Grove wrestled with two riddles: How can we define and measure output by knowledge workers? And what can be done to increase it? Grove was a scientific manager. He read everything in the budding fields of behavioral science and cognitive psychology. While the latest theories offered “a nicer way to get people to work” than in Henry Ford’s heyday, controlled university experiments “simply would not show that one style of leadership was better than another.

…

OKRs MBOs Intel OKRs “What” “What” and “How” Annual Quarterly or Monthly Private and Siloed Public and Transparent Top-down Bottom-up or Sideways (~50%) Tied to Compensation Mostly Divorced from Compensation Risk Averse Aggressive and Aspirational By 1975, when I arrived at Intel, Grove’s OKR system was in full swing. Every knowledge worker in the company formulated monthly individual objectives and key results. Within days of the iOPEC seminar, my supervisor directed me to do the same. I’d been put to work writing benchmarks for the 8080, Intel’s latest entry in the 8-bit microprocessor marketplace, where it reigned supreme. My goal was to show how our chip was faster and generally beat the competition.

Raw Data Is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

The best description of the dataverse from within precipitates nicely from the wonderful observation from Benjamin that Krajewski cites in chapter 6 (this volume): “And even today, as the current scientific method teaches us, the book is an archaic intermediate between two different card index systems. For everything substantial is found in the slip box of the researcher who wrote it and the scholar who studies in it, assimilated into its own card index.” We typically conceive of knowledge as passing from knowledge worker to knowledge worker via the intermediary of the datum. However, as Marx displayed so brilliantly with his M-C-M (money-commodity-money) cycle, we can achieve analytic purchase by looking at C-M-C (which in our era, felicitously, may refer to computer-mediated communication). We can start perhaps by refining the terms of the cycle.

Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Studio speakers are on either side, focused on the one chair in the middle of all the equipment. A television is mounted at eye level, above the audio monitor. A telephone is at his right hand. And directly in front of him is the computer and modem. David Gans marinates himself in media for a living. Not exactly what Peter Drucker envisioned when he coined the term knowledge worker, I'd bet. David Gans, like a lot of others these days, is multitasking. The WELL is just part of the information flow. Then there is Mandel , who appears at first glance to better fit the image of the information-age specialist. He brought some kind 26-04-2012 21:42 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 15 de 27 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/2.html of intellectual respectability to the high-tech bull session.

…

For some time now, these early adopters have been joined by the first ranks of the mainstream CMC users. Increasingly, many people who paint houses or build boats or work in an office or hospital or sell real estate, but who are curious about new cultural phenomena and not afraid of using a computer keyboard to express themselves, are mixing it up with the knowledge workers. People who work for themselves, whether it is with their hands or their symbols, have been plugging into the Net for the kind of tactical and emotional support others get at the office or factory. Since so many members of virtual communities are workers whose professional standing is based on what they know, virtual communities can be practical instruments.

…

If you need specific information or an expert opinion or a pointer to a resource, a virtual community is like a living encyclopedia. Virtual communities can help their members, whether or not they are information-related workers, to cope with information overload. The problem with the information age, especially for students and knowledge workers who spend their time immersed in the info flow, is that there is too much information available and few effective filters for sifting the key data that are useful and interesting to us as individuals. Programmers are trying to design better and better software agents that can seek and sift, filter and find, and save us from the awful feeling one gets when it turns out that the specific knowledge one needs is buried in fifteen thousand pages of related information.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

And these changes build and feed on each other so that the possibilities offered really are constantly expanding. This has been the case for as long as businesses have been using computers, even when we were still in the front half of the chessboard. The personal computer, for example, democratized computing in the early 1980s, putting processing power in the hands of more and more knowledge workers. In the mid-1990s two major innovations appeared: the World Wide Web and large-scale commercial business software like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The former gave companies the ability to tap new markets and sales channels, and also made available more of the world’s knowledge than had ever before been possible; the latter let firms redesign their processes, monitor and control far-flung operations, and gather and analyze vast amounts of data.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Everything should be made as simple as possible, George Santayana, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex

The Real Work of Knowledge Work Welcome to the real-life experience of “knowledge work,” and a profound operational principle: You have to think about your stuff more than you realize but not as much as you’re afraid you might. As Peter Drucker has written, “In knowledge work . . . the task is not given; it has to be determined. ‘What are the expected results from this work?’ is . . . the key question in making knowledge workers productive. And it is a question that demands risky decisions. There is usually no right answer; there are choices instead. And results have to be clearly specified, if productivity is to be achieved.” The ancestor of every action is a thought. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Most people have a resistance to initiating the burst of energy that it will take to clarify the real meaning, for them, of something they have let into their world, and to decide what they need to do about it.

…

We need to transform all the “stuff” we’re trying to organize into actionable stuff we need to do. “Stuff” is not inherently a bad thing. Things that command our attention, by their very nature, usually show up as “stuff.” But once “stuff” comes into our lives and work, we have an inherent commitment to ourselves to define and clarify its meaning. That’s our responsibility as knowledge workers; if “stuff” were already transformed and clear, our value, other than physical labor, would probably not be required. At the conclusion of one of my seminars, a senior manager of a major biotech firm looked back at the to-do lists she had come in with and said, “Boy, that was an amorphous blob of undoability!”

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

Futurologists forecasted the advent of a new ‘knowledge economy’, which would see a shift away from the standardised manual work of old, towards a higher concentration of smart jobs in the service and computer-based industries (Bell, 1973). Now a political orthodoxy, the notion of a new ‘knowledge economy’ was first celebrated by economists and sociologists in the 1960s, when it was generally believed that the future prosperity of nations would depend on their ability to produce intelligent, knowledgeable workers for a new era of work. Post-industrial forms of employment would help reintroduce the ‘human factor’ into work, and jobs would no longer simply be about efficiency and obeying orders; they would draw on the more distinctively human qualities such as social competence, cognitive ability, practical experience, or consciousness of responsibility, offering workers new opportunities to feel morally invested in their work (Offe, 1985: 137–8).

…

P. (1967) ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present, 38, 1, pp 56–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/past/38.1.56 Thompson, E. P. (1976) ‘Romanticism, Moralism and Utopianism: The Case of William Morris’, New Left Review, 99, pp 83–111. Thompson, P., C. Warhurst and G. Callaghan (2001) ‘Ignorant Theory and Knowledgeable Workers: Interrogating the Connections Between Knowledge, Skills and Services’, Journal of Management Studies, 38, 7, pp 923–942. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00266 Thoreau, H. (1962) ‘Life Without Principle’, in H. Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings, edited by J. Krutch, New York: Bantam Books.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

After Frederick Taylor came Peter Drucker, an Austrian-born intellectual whose thirty-nine books, including Concept of the Corporation (1946) and The Practice of Management (1954), established him as “the father of modern management.” Drucker was a trained economist and respected academic who coined the term knowledge worker. He loved Taylor and ranked him above all other business thinkers. He shared Taylor’s love of quantification and data gathering. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” is perhaps Drucker’s most famous quote. Later came Michael Porter, a Harvard business professor who claimed to have developed a methodology that would enable companies to create sustainable advantages using his Five Forces Framework.

…

Management Science Meets the Information Age Twentieth-century Taylorite methodologies like Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, and the Toyota Production System were developed for manufacturing physical things—cars, airplanes, lawn furniture, whatever. But now we’re in the Information Age, and most of us work with our brains, not our hands. Of course, with the rise of the Internet, clever management consultants started wondering if you could create a system that would optimize the productivity of knowledge workers and impose rigor and discipline on tasks like writing software code. And hey, if you could develop a scientific system for writing software, why not apply that to every aspect of running a company? Two new forms of Taylorism attempt to do that. The biggest is Agile, a management fad that has swept the corporate world and morphed into what some call a movement but is more like widespread mental illness.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

This is why we still find advertising by lawyers and doctors somewhat off-putting, and why Americans were once shocked to learn that radio personalities took money to play records they didn’t genuinely like: because professionals are supposed to answer to a spirit more noble than personal gain.7 With the rise of the postindustrial economy in the last few decades, the range of professionals has exploded. To use the voguish term, these are “knowledge workers,” and many of them don’t fit easily into the old framework. They are often employees rather than independent practitioners, taking orders from some corporate manager instead of spending their lives in private practice. These modern professionals aren’t workers per se, and they aren’t capitalists either, strictly speaking.

…

The Boston area has all the ancillary advantages to show for it: a highly educated population, an unusually large number of patents, and more Nobel laureates than any other city in the country.7 Harvard University, the country’s oldest institution of higher learning, is actually mentioned in Massachusetts’s 1780 constitution, a document which quaintly declares the commonwealth’s interest in promoting “the republic of Letters.” These days, all Americans are interested in higher ed, but not because we want better poets and theologians. We love our universities because we believe they carry a straight-up payoff in dollars. Here, too, Massachusetts is the model. The Boston area has prospered fabulously as knowledge workers have become the country’s dominant cohort. In every sort of lab-coat and starched-shirt pursuit the city is well-represented: it has R&D; it has law firms; it has investment banks; it has management consulting; it has a remarkable concentration of life-science businesses. The coming of post-industrial society* has treated this most ancient of American cities extremely well.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

Here AI shouldn’t be viewed as a straight-out job destroyer since, indeed, the only alternative to employing AI would be to ignore the data (as is often the case even today). “People who worry about job losses to automation tend to overlook the unprecedented data explosion businesses are experiencing, now accelerating out of knowledge workers’ control and demanding automation to deal with it,” write London School of Economics professors Leslie Willcocks and Mary Lacity.13 Many of the firms that the professors studied have already adopted RPA solutions, and yet they have promised their workers that the robots would not lead to any layoffs—even if the RPAs meant that there would be no new hires in the department.

…

World Economic Forum, “The Future of Jobs Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” January 2016. 11. Masayuki Morikawa, “Who Are Afraid of Losing Their Jobs to Artificial Intelligence and Robots? Evidence from a Survey,” RIETI Discussion Paper 17-E-069, 2017. 12. Pew Research Center, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs,” August 2014. 13. Mary C. Lacity and Leslie Willcocks, “What Knowledge Workers Stand to Gain from Automation,” Harvard Business Review, June 19, 2015. 14. Rita Brunk, “The ABC of RPA, Part 5: What Is the Cost of Automation and How Do I Justify It to the Leadership Team?” Genfour.com, July 21, 2016. 15. Patrick Clark and Kim Bhasin, “Amazon’s Robot War Is Spreading,” Bloomberg, April 5, 2017. 16.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

In the workplace, automation’s focus on enhancing speed and efficiency—a focus determined by the profit motive rather than by any particular concern for people’s well-being—often has the effect of removing complexity from jobs, diminishing the challenge they present and hence the engagement they promote. Automation can narrow people’s responsibilities to the point that their jobs consist largely of monitoring a computer screen or entering data into prescribed fields. Even highly trained analysts and other so-called knowledge workers are seeing their work circumscribed by decision-support systems that turn the making of judgments into a data-processing routine. The apps and other programs we use in our private lives have similar effects. By taking over difficult or time-consuming tasks, or simply rendering those tasks less onerous, the software makes it even less likely that we’ll engage in efforts that test our skills and give us a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

…

(quiz show), 118–19, 121 Jobless Future, The (Aronowitz and DiFazio), 27–28 jobs, 14–17, 27–33, 85, 193 automation’s altering of, 67, 112–20 blue-collar, 28, 109 creating, 31, 32, 33 growth of, 28, 30, 32 loss of, 20, 21, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 40, 59, 115–18, 227 middle class, 27, 31, 32, 33n white-collar, 28, 30, 32, 40, 109 Jobs, Steve, 194 Jones, Michael, 132, 136–37, 151 Kasparov, Garry, 12 Katsuyama, Brad, 171 Kay, Rory, 58 Kelly, Kevin, 153, 225, 226 Kennedy, John, 27, 33 Kessler, Andy, 153 Keynes, John Maynard, 26–27, 66, 224, 227 Khosla, Vinod, 153–54 killing, robots and, 184, 185, 187–93 “Kitty Hawk” (Frost), 215 Klein, Gary, 123 Knight Capital Group, 156 know-how, 74, 76, 115, 122–23 knowledge, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80–81, 84, 85, 111, 121, 123, 131, 148, 153, 206, 214, 215 design, 144 explicit (declarative), 9, 10–11, 83 geographic, 128 medicine and, 100, 113, 123 tacit (procedural), 9–11, 83, 105, 113, 144 knowledge workers, 17, 148 Kool, Richard, 228–29 Korzybski, Alfred, 220 Kroft, Steve, 29 Krueger, Alan, 30–31 Krugman, Paul, 32–33 Kurzweil, Ray, 181, 200 labor, 227 abridging of, 23–25, 28–31, 37, 96 costs of, 18, 20, 31, 175 deskilling of, 106–12 division of, 106–7, 165 intellectualization of, 118 in “Mowing,” 211–14 strife, 37, 175 see also jobs; work Labor and Monopoly Capital (Braverman), 109–10 Labor Department, U.S., 66 labor unions, 25, 37, 59 Langewiesche, William, 50–51, 170 language, 82, 121, 150 Latour, Bruno, 204, 208 lawn mowers, robotic, 185 lawyers, law, 12, 116–17, 120, 123, 166 learning, 72–73, 77, 82, 84, 88–90, 175 animal studies and, 88–89 medical, 100–102 Lee, John, 163–64, 166, 169 LeFevre, Judith, 14, 15, 18 leisure, 16, 25, 27, 227 work vs., 14–16, 18 lethal autonomous robots (LARs), 188–93 Levasseur, Émile, 24–25 Leveson, Nancy, 155–56 Levesque, Hector, 121 Levinson, Stephen, 101 Levy, Frank, 9, 10 Lewandowsky, Stephan, 74 Lex Machina, 116–17 Licklider, J.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

In 2015, journalist Lauren Smiley described the growing on-demand, app-based economy as the shut-in economy, where “you’re either pampered, isolated royalty—or you’re a 21st century servant.”10 Smiley observed that San Francisco was increasingly divided into two groups. On one side were the tech workers and a broader group of “knowledge” workers who earned high salaries, worked long hours, and used the gig apps to get everything from food delivery and laundry services to house cleaning, dog walking, and childcare. On the other was the contract labor force that delivered those services with few protections, no benefits, and precariously low pay.

…

As the tech economy was entering a new stage after the dot-com bubble had burst, cities tried to attract a particular class of worker in the hope that industries wanting to employ them would follow. The “creative class” theory, as outlined by urbanist and consultant Richard Florida, asserted that governments needed to create urban amenities and pass laws that would specifically appeal to this segment of high-demand “knowledge” workers with above-average incomes, further sidelining the residents who had already been hit by the shift to urban entrepreneurialism. In the process of importing affluent workers, cities embraced further gentrification, causing house prices to soar and urban inequality to deepen. In line with Florida’s model, sociologist Sharon Zukin explained that before the 2008 recession, cities assumed that “providing green space, bicycle paths, and cultural facilities, all much cheaper than affordable housing and more politically palatable than business subsidies, would help them to be winners in the global economy.”15 But with the post-recession growth of the tech industry, cities were positioned as “the social and cultural locus of technological innovation that makes businesses and countries winners in the global economy.”16 Guided by that strategy, there was a greater focus on providing public support to grow the sector and to ensure universities were producing both the talent and the intellectual property to form start-ups and attract industry giants.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

THE COMING WAVE OF WHITE COLLAR AUTOMATION… AND WHY TEACHING EVERYONE TO CODE IS NOT A SOLUTION The specter of job automation typically conjures up images of industrial robots toiling in factories or warehouses. The conventional wisdom suggests that, while lower-wage, less-educated, blue collar workers face a dire threat from technology, knowledge workers educated with at least a bachelor’s degree—or in other words, anyone whose occupation consists of tasks that are primarily of an intellectual, rather than a manual, nature—remain on relatively safe ground. The reality, however, is that white collar jobs, and in particular those that center on relatively routine analysis, manipulation, extraction or communication of information, are going to be squarely in the sights as artificial intelligence advances and is deployed ever more widely.

…

As technology begins to encroach on even these more educated and highly paid workers, inequality is likely to become ever more top heavy, with a tiny elite that owns vast amounts of capital pulling away from everyone else. As better-paid workers are increasingly impacted, this will further undermine consumer spending and the potential for robust economic growth. One possible upside, however, is that better-paid knowledge workers wield far more political power than their counterparts who work in factories or low-wage service occupations. As a result, the impact on white collar jobs may actually help to galvanize support for a policy response to technological disruption of the job market. WHICH JOBS ARE SAFEST? Over the past few years, I’ve traveled to nearly every continent and given dozens of presentations on the potential impact of artificial intelligence and robotics on job markets.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Perlow says that while brick-and-mortar retail will not disappear, in “ten years hence [the] retail footprint will be a shadow of its former self and heavy competition from online will allow only the strongest brick-and-mortar businesses to survive.”32 As in other industries where automation is quickly reducing human labor, virtual retailing is following suit. At best we can say that the future does not look good for the 4.3 million workers in brick-and-mortar retail as we move closer to near zero marginal labor costs and a near workerless world.33 Even Knowledge Workers are Expendable By 2005, the anecdotal evidence of automation replacing workers in the manufacturing and service industries was no longer an object of curiosity. Automation had become pervasive. Everywhere we turned, it seemed, workers had disappeared and we found ourselves surrounded by intelligent-machine surrogates talking to us, listening to us, directing us, advising us, doing business with us, entertaining us, and watching over us.

…

Using eDiscovery software, Herr found only 60 percent accuracy when attorneys were doing the research, leading him to gripe: “Think about how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin toss.”35 Very few professional skills are being spared the long arm of IT and Big Data–crunching by algorithms. Knowledge workers of every stripe and variety—radiologists, accountants, middle managers, graphic designers, and even marketers—are already feeling the heat as pattern-recognition software begins to penetrate every professional field. Mike McCready is the head of a startup company called Music Xray, a firm that uses Big Data and algorithms to identify potential musical hits.

…

Behrokh, 96–97 Kickstarter, 256 Ki-moon, Ban 285 Koenig, Friedrich, 44 Konrath, Sarah, 280 Kuhn, Thomas, 9 Kümmel, Reiner, 71 Kurzweil, Ray, 84 Lamberth, Laurie, 74–75 Lange, Oskar, 5–7 last worker standing, 121–133 and the end of work, 121–128 even knowledge workers are expendable, 128–133 Latif, Majib, 288 laws of thermodynamics, govern all economic activity, 10–11 Layard, Richard, 277 Leontief, Wassily, 5, 105 Lessig, Lawrence, 175, 177–180, 185, 188 Lewis, James W., 281 Linux, 170, 175–176, 199, 309 live healthier lives, how to, 275 local exchange trading systems (LETS), 259–262 Locke, John, 60–62 Loescher, Peter, 14 The London Independent, 188 Lovelock, James, 184 L3C laws, 265 Luther, Martin, 58–59 Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), 241–242 Lynch, Mike, 129 Lynn, Mary Scott, 147 Makerbot Industries, 94 Makers Movement, 93–94, 99, 103 manufacture vs. infofacture, 90 marginal cost economy. see near zero marginal cost society Margulis, Lynn, 184 market economy, 4, 61 rise of the 32–38 Martin, Dean, 144 Marx, Karl, 33, 41, 105 massive open online courses (MOOCs), 4, 109–119, 247, 309–310 and the decline of the brick and mortar classroom, 113–119 negatives of, 117–118 the one-room schoolhouse with two billion students, 109–113 and peer-to-peer grading, 115–116 and service learning, 111–113, 264 and teachers as facilitators, 110 see also Coursera; edX; Udacity materialism/materialist(s), 276–279 mercantilist policies, 37 Mestrallet, Gérard, 141 microcurrencies, 259–262 microgrid(s), 103–104, 107, 294–295 microplot(s), 239 micropower plant(s), 69, 101, 102, 146, 267, 294–295 Millennial Generation, 19, 226, 230, 252, 264, 280–283 Mill, John Stuart, 63 Moglen, Eben, 175–176 monopoly or oligopoly, 6–8, 23, 198, 202, 307 and AT&T, 49–51 and effect on capitalism, 3 “natural monopoly,” 8, 50–51, 136–138, 203–204 temporary, 8 Montreuil, Benoit, 219–220 Moore, Gordon, 79–82 Moore’s Law, 79–80, 82, 147, 169 More, Sir Thomas, 31 Morgan Stanley, 54, 292 Mosaic, 146, 256–257 Moss, Frank, 242 music sharing, 232 Music Xray, 130 Myspace, 201 Napster, 170, 232 National Human Genome Research Institute, 169 Resources Defense Council (NRDC), 147 Science Foundation, 96 Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), 149 near zero marginal cost society, 68–151 ascent of the prosumer and the build-out of the smart economy, extreme productivity, the Internet of Things, and free energy, 69–87 getting closer to, 84–87 the last worker standing, 121–133 and marginal cost controversy, 135–138 MOOCs, 109–119 reluctance to come to grips with, 5 3D printing, 89–108 see also paradigm shift from market capitalism to Collaborative Commons network neutrality, 197–198, 203 The New Capitalist Manifesto (Haque), 253 Networked Commons, 119, 151, 173, 190, 194, 202, 212, 221, 222, 229–233, 237–241, 309 Newmark, Craig, 249 The New York Times, 5, 129, 251, 281 Noam, Eli, 151, 194 Northern Renaissance, 36, 300 Noubel, Jean-Francois, 262 Obama, President Barack, 71–72, 128 Occupy Movement, 57 oil cost of, 87, 137–138, 233 crude oil reserves are dwindling, 86–87 and infrastructure, 72 mass production of automobiles, effect on, 52–53 and the Second Industrial Revolution, 47–54 spills, 165, 290 Standard Oil Company, 48–49, 51 see also fossil fuel(s); Hall, Andy online higher education. see massive open online courses (MOOCs) Open Source Initiative (OSI), 176 “optimum general welfare,” 3 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 21, 277 The Origin of Species (Darwin), 64 Ostrom, Elinor, 158–162, 175, 190 Paine, Thomas, 65 paradigm shift from market capitalism to Collaborative Commons, 1–25 and changing the economic paradigm, 9–11 and the Internet of Things, 11–16 and the rise of the Collaborative Commons, 16–25 Parkifi, 145–146 Patagonia, 263 patent(s), 138, 165–167, 170, 174–177, 180–181, 202 patient-driven research (PDR), 19, 240–247 peer-to-peer social lending, 255–257 Perens, Bruce, 176 Perlow, Jason, 128 Perry, Mark J., 122–123 Personal Genome Project, 180 The Philosophy of Money (Simmel), 259 phone, importance of, 49–51 population, key to stabilization of, 285 poverty, 21, 107–112, 209, 264, 275–278, 283–286 print, and the impact it had on the way we do business, 35–36, 178–179 printing press(es), 33–37, 44–45 privacy, age of, 75–77 property relations, notion of, 30–32 prosumer(s) ascent of the, 135–151 beyond governments and markets, 150–151 and the clean web, 144–147 definition of, 4, 90 and free wi-fi for everyone, 147–149 and power to the people, 138–144 protests to reclaim the public Commons, 187–188 QR code, 127 Quigg, Donald J., 166 rallying around free software, 174–177 Raspberry Pi, 80 Raymond, Eric S., 176–177 RelayRides, 228 rental(s)/renting. see social capital and the sharing economy reputation rankings on the web, 257–259 reviews, consumer-generated, 248–249 Rifkin, Milton, 305–306, 309 rise in collaborative innovation, 21 Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, 212–213 Rockefeller, John D., 48–49 Rose, Carol, 157–158 Rowe, Jonathan 190 Royal Dutch Shell, 49, 54, 142 Ruben, Andy, 237–238 Rural Electric Administration (REA), 209–210 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 3 Say’s Law, 3 scarcity. see abundance Schelgel, Heather, 262 Scherzer, Norman, 243 Schlatter, Richard, 30, 62 Schor, Juliet, 280 Schumacher, E.

Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations by Dan Ariely

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, behavioural economics, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, IKEA effect, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, science of happiness, Snapchat, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Sometimes I might be highly motivated to find a particular answer to a question, but the concept I am working on is not the right one. Sometimes I might not be terribly motivated, but I stumble on a good research topic. The challenges with measuring my productivity are not unique to professors; in fact, they are common to most knowledge workers. Your productivity is likely to be as complex, if not more so, than mine to measure. To test the effectiveness of different motivations, we needed to study a work environment in which employee output could be easily and accurately measured and where the tasks were more or less constant. I lucked out when Guy Hochman, then a Duke postdoctoral fellow, introduced me to Liad Bareket, who worked in the HR department at Intel in Israel.

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

“But what do you mean by scale? What did you see back then?” “Two things. I did a scaling study in the ’50s that convinced me that components would keep getting cheaper and there was going to be all the bandwidth you could ever use—” Doug answered. “That was before the integrated circuit,” I interrupted. “So that every knowledge worker was going to be equipped.” Doug Engelbart rightly ignored me and kept talking. “The other scale was human scale—” “You mean, computers easy to use,” I interrupted again. “Well, that’s part of it. Yes, certainly there is scale from getting people to use complex systems, from hiding the complexity from them, so the hurdle is lowered.” 122 Running Money “That’s the human scale.”

…

See intellectual property IPOs, 3, 60, 97, 212–16, 248, 293 iron industry, 52–53, 55–57, 59, 125 IRR (internal rate of return), 170–71 Island, 207, 288 Janus, 229 Japan, 134, 175, 204, 257, 259–60, 261 consumer economy and, 68 economic output of, 234 U.S. debt and, 257 yen crisis, 162–65, 168, 292 Japanese Fair Trade Commission, 160 Java (programming language), 151 J-curve, 264–66 JetBlue, 292 job market, 241–45, 246, 261 305 Jobs, Steve, 118, 119, 121, 128 Johns-Manville, 236 Johnson & Johnson, 236 joint-stock companies, 92–93 Jones, Alfred Winslow, 10 JP Morgan, 11, 49, 144, 209 junk bonds, 11 Kapor, Mitch, 121 Karlgaard, Rich, 195 Kay, John, 64 Kaye, William, 9–13, 48, 153 Kessler, Kurt, 245 Kessler, Nancy, 117–18, 193, 194–95, 288 Kilby, Jack, 101 Kittler, Fred, 1–4, 6, 14–17, 29–31, 33–36, 47, 49, 60–62, 73–76, 81–82, 91, 96, 97, 104, 106–7, 138–43, 164, 167, 169, 172, 175, 203, 205, 206, 209–16, 219, 223–26, 246, 288, 295, 296 hedge fund partnership, 144, 151–52 Kleiner Perkins, 195, 197 Kleinrock, Leonard, 183, 184–86, 191 knowledge workers, 121–23 Korea, 1, 3, 134, 208, 234, 259–60 Kotick, Bobby, 50 Kramlich, Dick, 144, 194, 195, 197 labor costs. See outsourcing LANs. See local area networks laptops, 155, 259, 277 Lardner, Dionysius, 93 Larscom, 97 Larson, Bill, 18, 19 laser diode drivers, 81, 84 layer 4–7 switching, 140 306 LCDs, 2, 3, 155, 156–57 Lehman Brothers, 44 Lerner, Sandy, 191 Lewis, Michael, 25 Liar’s Poker (Lewis), 25 Liberate, 176, 177 limited liability corporations, 57 Lincoln Lab (MIT), 187 Linux operating system, 247 liquid crystal displays, 155, 156–57 literacy, 122 local area networks, 187, 188, 189–91, 197, 199 locomotives, 92–93 Logitech, 259 London Metal Exchange, 94 Long Term Capital Management, 11, 163, 166–69 looms, 64–65, 66 Lotus, 200 Lotus 1–2–3 spreadsheet, 66 Lotus Notes, 200 Lovitz, Jon, 262 LSI Logic, 130, 141 Lucent, 290 Lusitania (ocean liner), 95 Lynch, Peter, 27–28 Macromedia, 97 Malaysia, 1, 132, 175, 199, 252, 270, 281 management, 106–7 manufacturing capital investment in, 90–91 design vs., 99–100, 234, 268 intellectual property separated from, 128, 130–35, 136, 234–35, 238, 251, 271 inventions and, 55–56, 58, 89, 125–26, 272 Index job market and, 241–45, 246, 261 outsourced low costs of, 133–35, 175, 251, 258–59 second derivatives, 26–28, 72, 77, 226 See also industrial economy; Industrial Revolution margin surplus, 234, 259, 260, 262–63, 266, 270, 295 importance of, 275, 277, 279, 280–83 PC’s effect on, 258 MAR/Hedge, 169 market demand, 78 components of, 57–59 Marks, Art, 144 Matsushita, 134 Mauretania (ocean liner), 95 Mayfield, 194 MCI, 61, 62, 72 Mead, Carver, 183 Meeker, Mary, 228 memory chips, 124, 126, 127, 154–55, 156 Metcalfe, Bob, 183, 188–91, 202, 290 Metcalfe’s Law, 190, 226 Mexican debt crisis, 164 Michelson, Albert, 190 microchips, 11, 46–47, 102–3, 129–35, 154–55 company sales, 208 development of, 124–28 outsourced manufacture of, 130–35, 199, 252–55, 259 production costs, 141 See also microprocessors Microma, 127–28 Micron Technology, 19–21, 154 Index microprocessors, 101, 123–28 demand for faster, 66 significance of, 125, 183 Microsoft, 61, 69, 97, 128, 142, 194, 207, 260, 270 browser, 199–201 company value, 274 innovative process of, 278 tie-ins by, 197 as top market cap company, 111 See also Windows Microstrategy, 177 Microsystems, 44 Milken, Michael, 11 Miller, George, 223 mining industry, 53, 57–59 MIT, 184, 185, 187 MMC (chip company), 208 momentum funds, 207 Mondale, Walter, 187 Monetary Conference, 264–65 monster markets, 45, 46, 67, 248, 279, 295 Montgomery Securities Hedge Fund conference, 29–33 Moore, Gordon, 103, 124, 128 Moore, Nick, 18–21, 72, 162, 175–81, 188, 208, 217–19, 228–29, 293, 296 Moore’s Law, 103, 124 Morgan Stanley, 11, 24–25, 39–40, 45, 131, 153, 160, 224, 251 Morgan Stanley Tech Conference (2001), 228–29 Morgan Stanley Tokyo, 154 Morley, Edward, 190 Morse Chain, 110 Mosaic Communications, 193, 195, 196–97 Mostek, 127 Motorola, 11, 127 307 mouse inventor of, 118, 119 outsourced manufacture of, 259 MP3.com, 212–16, 226, 248, 293 MP3 files, 206 Mueller, Glenn, 194, 195, 197–98 Mueller, Nancy, 198 music downloading, 202, 205–8, 247 copyright violation, 293 domain rights, 212–16, 226, 248 piracy, 206–7, 263 See also Napster music software, 146–49 mutual funds, 290 nanotechnology, 296 Napoleonic Wars, 25, 271 Napster, 190, 202, 203, 205–7, 213, 248, 263 NASA, 101, 184 NASA/Ames, 187 NASDAQ, 223, 224, 225, 288 Nash, Jack, 14–17, 24, 29, 105, 278 National Center for Supercomputing Applications, 197 NCP, 185 Nelson, Ted, 118 NetApp.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Between 1980 and 2010, 1.1 billion adults entered the twenty- to sixty-four-year-old age bracket and joined the world’s labor force.25 But due to a host of demographic factors, global labor force growth will fall by nearly one-third by 2030.26 At the same time, technology is roiling labor markets as never before. Computers, which historically replaced manual and clerical workers, such as stenographers and bank tellers, are now beginning to replace knowledge and skilled workers, like journalists and stock analysts. By 2025, in fact, computers could do the work of 140 million knowledge workers, and robots could do the work of another 75 million people.27 And yet there will still be high demand for skilled positions in engineering, software development, and health care. Four out of ten respondents in a McKinsey survey reported that they currently couldn’t find the talent they need.

…

For example, as part of a financial inclusion program, introduction of technology allowed twenty thousand less-skilled workers in southern India to work as rural banking agents, processing payments with smart cards, cell phones, and kiosks. Using technology to improve the productivity of professional and managerial work has traditionally not received as much attention as it has for more labor-intensive occupations. Research, however, is showing that organizations could realize improvements in knowledge-worker productivity by about 20 percent.19 Using social platforms as a primary way to communicate and collaborate would vastly reduce the time it takes to write and answer e-mails, eliminate lengthy searches for internal knowledge and expertise, and reduce other tasks that consume the equivalent of a day’s work per week.

Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook by Michael Lopp

do what you love, finite state, game design, job satisfaction, John Gruber, knowledge worker, reality distortion field, remote working, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sorting algorithm, systems thinking, web application

On Experience In order to appreciate this chapter, you need to make a leap—you need to believe that your boss's experience is valuable. You need to believe and accept that the fact he's been doing this 10 years longer than you means his opinion is more informed. His decisions are based on something more than gut feel and delusions of grandeur. We're knowledge workers, which is an awkwardly lame way of stating that we don't actually build physical things with our hands. We build nonphysical things with our minds. We create interesting arrangements of ones and zeros in the confines of our caves, coalescing our ideas into things that are, hopefully, useful enough that someone else is willing to pay for them.

…

judgment, as source of the Nerves, The Nerves K keyboard support, My Tools Are Designed to Remove Repetitive Motion Keynote software, The Unforgivable Mistake knowledge, Delivery, The Gaps, The Gaps Alpha Knowledge team members, The Gaps as fundamental unit of growth, Delivery knowledge workers, On Experience L language, Apprenticeship, You Will Be a Multilingual Translator, You Will Be a Multilingual Translator in company groups, You Will Be a Multilingual Translator industry, Apprenticeship lawyers, calls from, The Itch leadership, People Lie, Some Are Evil, Others Just Want to Screw You, Circle of Comfort, Context Switcher, Context Switcher, Knowledge and Ability: "Alpha Knowledge" as composure under stress, Context Switcher evolution of roles, People Lie, Some Are Evil, Others Just Want to Screw You Maestro team members, Knowledge and Ability: "Alpha Knowledge" role of, Circle of Comfort listening, Bridge, Bridge, You Go to a Lot of Meetings detecting company culture, Bridge management responsibility for, You Go to a Lot of Meetings lists, The Taste of the Day, The Taste of the Day, The Trickle List taste of the day, The Taste of the Day Trickle List, The Trickle List lying, as skill, People Lie, Some Are Evil, Others Just Want to Screw You lynchpin departure, Why are they letting them go?

Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life by David Allen

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, shareholder value, Skype, telemarketer

Companies have consequently tried to institute such policies as “no-e-mail Fridays” and “quiet hours” not only to curb the inefficiencies that result from the psychic noise, but also to give sufficient breathing room for the reflective, creative process that some are savvy enough to recognize as strategically important for their knowledge workers. Most of the studies of these issues and proposed remedies center on the external environment—too much e-mail, too many interruptions, too much or too little communication, too much change too fast, and so on. Solutions that focus only on decreasing the volume or speed of input will be temporary at best and artificially constricting and numbing at worst.

…

If so, you are in an ideal position to take advantage of the models I will be sharing with you here. Making It All Work will give you a road map for life. Or for throwing your kid a birthday party. Or for arranging your home office. Or for hiring a VP of marketing. It will provide whatever you might need to get more in control or more appropriately focused. Feeling lost is a consistent knowledge-worker phenomenon. When you have to think and constantly rethink precisely to know what to do, given the slippery changing nature of work today, it is incredibly easy to lose your way. Ever find yourself wrapped around an unexpected e-mail for forty-five minutes and then wonder what happened, and what the heck to do now about all the other stuff you thought you needed to tackle, whose status has now changed, but you’re not sure exactly how to go about doing so?

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Responding correctly to clues like these requires mastery of pattern matching and complex communication. And winning at Jeopardy! requires doing both things repeatedly, accurately, and almost instantaneously. During the 2011 shows, Watson competed against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two of the best knowledge workers in this esoteric industry. Jennings won Jeopardy! a record seventy-four times in a row in 2004, taking home more than $3,170,000 in prize money and becoming something of a folk hero along the way.17 In fact, Jennings is sometimes given credit for the existence of Watson.18 According to one story circulating within IBM, Charles Lickel, a research manager at the company interested in pushing the frontiers of artificial intelligence, was having dinner in a steakhouse in Fishkill, New York, one night in the fall of 2004.

…

He was a Montessori kid for the earliest years of his schooling, and agrees completely with Larry Page that “part of that training [was] not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world, doing things a little bit differently.”12 Our recommendations about how people can remain valuable knowledge workers in the new machine age are straightforward: work to improve the skills of ideation, large-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication instead of just the three Rs. And whenever possible, take advantage of self-organizing learning environments, which have a track record of developing these skills in people.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar