Knowledge what?! Just carry out your job and don’t ask why...

Are your main jobs to work with data analysis, to research and contrast information, to elaborate models, concepts and methods, to manage the public or the customer service, but you are working as if you were part of a machine, a piece of a production chain, where everything you do must be carefully measured and designed within time and resources’ parameters to increase the output per worker? Welcome to the real world of the knowledge economy.

I realize that more and more of my colleagues and good friend from university were trained and are still specializing in developing creativity, knowledge and information. I’ve studied mass media and journalism and of course, from that old and traditional school, you only “learn” (or get notions) about the fancy face of the information, ignoring how industry determines the real meaning of working with information. In many cases there’s no much differences between a big journal production and the automotive assembly factory.

However this writing is not about how mass media industry is burning itself out, but about contradictions among expectations of knowledge workers (with new skills and intellectual capabilities), and the so called “scientific management” still prevailing in a lot of large (and not so large) enterprises.

When we talk about scientific management, we are alluding to a classical way of managing operations within organizations, which reduce every job to a defined set of tasks, with very little discussion about how their performance impact on people’s needs and interests. You are just a part of a machine assembly factory. I think between this approach and “the slavery” mentality there is just a short step in practice.

Thus, the main goal of organizations managed in this way, is improve efficiency, and to get the most profit from the smallest cost of production. Measurement tools of every task are very well arranged. This approach has its origins at the beginning of the last century (1910), when researchers like F.W Taylor were concerned about describing (and prescribing) an objective method in which the works should be done to achieve the optimal efficiency. This management model was justified (in some sense) in a historic period of industrial development and flourishing of social sciences.

Nevertheless, since this scientific approach to management is quite objective, controllable and practical for managers being accountable with numbers, it became deeply embedded in management thinking still nowadays.

The rupture begins when the objects of production changes and, with them, the features of the workforce for carrying out the new services in the new economy (intellectual assets very well based in managing information).

Of course you can say not all companies implement this reductionist way of management. There are several new more humane approaches which consider the talent’s development of workers, stimulate autonomy of teams in monitoring results and takes care about the permanent training and coaching of people’s competences. And it’s ok. But I think all this stuff is minimized by the imperialism of the rational need of having quantitative control. The need of very well bounded decisions about the overall performance of the company. Much more where (and when) managers and directors comes mainly from technological or scientific careers such as Engineers or Informatics. “For God sake! don’t ask why, just look at the numbers. And if you are not happy, review yourself!”.