Knowledge Workers Quotes

• Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

  Peter Drucker

  Inspirational, Change, Leadership

  "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen R. Covey, (p. 101), 1989.

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• The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.

  Peter Drucker

  Century, Assets, Institutions

  Peter Drucker (2012). “Management Challenges for the 21st Century”, p.116, Routledge

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• The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today's society.

  Peter Drucker

  Business, Keys, Challenges

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• Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation - literally. And 'knowledge workers' are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations.

  David Weinberger

  Jobs, Learning, Knowledge

  Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger (2011). “The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.195, Basic Books

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• Another study, of 38,000 knowledge workers across different sectors, found that the simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity. Even multitasking, that prized feat of modern-day office warriors, turns out to be a myth.

  Susan Cain

  Warrior, Simple, Office

  Susan Cain (2012). “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, p.85, Broadway Books

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• The best knowledge workers are working for more than money.

  Marshall Goldsmith

  Knowledge, Workers

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• The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle age, soured, cynical, unproductive.

  Peter Drucker

  Jobs, Cynical, Challenges

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• The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is ... to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker

  Peter Drucker

  Important, Needs, Management

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• Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America.

  John L. Lewis

  Future, Thoughtful, America

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• If people can't make ends meet at home with food, benefits, health, and health care in particular, how can they be present, engaged, knowledge workers when they come to work?

  Mark T Bertolini

  Home, People, Benefits

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Understanding our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong -- these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of knowledge workers.

  Peter Drucker

  Knowing, Organization, Understanding

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• Managers are agents of transformation, converting the workforce in developed countries from one of manual workers to one of highly educated knowledge workers.

  Peter Drucker

  Country, Agents, Transformation

  Peter F. Drucker (2014). “The Peter Drucker Collection on Managing in Turbulent Times: Management: Revised Edition, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Managing in Turbulent Times, and The Practice of Management”, p.43, Harper Collins

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• In this knowledge-worker age, it's now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs - so the pressure to do well is really high.

  Stephen Covey

  Jobs, School, Get Better

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• To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

  Peter Drucker

  Numbers, Risk, Needs

  Peter Ferdinand Drucker (2001). “The Essential Drucker: Selections from the Management Works of Peter F. Drucker”, Routledge

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• We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

  Peter Drucker

  Jobs, Skills, Numbers

  Peter Drucker, Alan Kantrow, Rick Wartzman, Julia Kirby (2016). “Get the Right Things Done: The Drucker Collection (6 Items)”, p.12, Harvard Business Review Press

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• The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the MANUAL WORKER in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.

  Peter Drucker

  Learning, Knowledge, Unique

  Peter Drucker (2012). “Management Challenges for the 21st Century”, p.116, Routledge

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• The 8th Habit, then, is not about adding one more habit to the 7 - 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. The 8th Habit is to Find Your Voice and Inspire Others to Find Theirs.

  Stephen Covey

  Voice, Challenges, Inspire

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• Public education is the key civil rights issue of the 21st century. Our nation's knowledge-based economy demands that we provide young people from all backgrounds and circumstances with the education and skills necessary to become knowledge workers. If we don't, we run the risk of creating an even larger gap between the middle class and the poor. This gap threatens our democracy, our society and the economic future of America.

  Eli Broad

  Running, Work, Issues

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• Throughout all the years and in everything we do, we have focused most of all on the development of human capacity, beginning with our own professional staff, and leveraging their expertise to enrich the Arab community. We have embraced the concept of the 'knowledge worker' and have sought to empower our people and the Arab world's people to dream, to imagine, and to create.

  Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

  Dream, Knowledge, Power

  National Seminar on Industrial Property and Technology Transfer in Arab States, Amman, Jordan, June 18, 2007.

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• Let me go out on a limb and suggest that those who see hints of a new class ideology developing around information technology are not necessarily wild-eyed. "Bit-twiddlers" are neither exactly proletariat nor bourgeoisie. They may not own the means of production in the sense that Marx argued, but they certainly do have significantly control over those means, in a more profound way than the term "symbols analysts" or "knowledge workers" captures. As a rough generalization, they value science and technological problem-solving elegance equally at least with profit.

  Steven Weber

  Mean, Technology, Class

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• ..there is need for a person to be generally educated. Otherwise you shrivel up much too soon. Whether this means reading the bible (I read the New Testament every few years) or reading the great 19th century novelists (the greatest and shrewdest judge of people and of society who ever lived), or classical philosophy (which I cannot read-it puts me to sleep immediately), or history (which is secondary). What matters is that the knowledge worker, by the time he or she reaches middle age, has developed and nourished a human being rather than a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer.

  Peter Drucker

  Education, Business, Philosophy

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• This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work... or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work - still abysmally low - will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people.

  Peter Drucker

  Class, Giving, People

  "Managing in a Time of Great Change". Book by Peter F. Drucker, 1995.

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• The technologies that will be most successful will resonate with human behaviour instead of working against it. In fact, to solve the problems of delivering and assimilating new technology into the workplace, we must look to the way humans act and react. In the last 20 years, US industry has invested more than $1 trillion in technology, but has realised little improvement in the efficiency of its knowledge workers ­ and virtually none in their effectiveness. If we could solve the problems of the assimilation of new technology, the potential would be enormous.

  John Seely Brown

  Successful, Technology, Effectiveness

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• The new industries are brainy industries and so-called knowledge workers tend to like to be near other people who are the same. Think of the City of Hollywood. People cluster. This means you have winning regions, such as London and Cambridge, and losing regions. The people who want to be top lawyers in Sunderland are hoovered up by London.

  Evan Davis

  Mean, Winning, Thinking

  "Evan Davis: 'I'm a presenter who is gay rather than a gay presenter'". Interview with Miranda Sawyer, www.theguardian.com. May 07, 2011.

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