Knowledge Workers
Thomas H. Davenport. Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers. We are going to need more books like this, and more thinkers like Davenport, if we are going to keep Peter Drucker’s legacy alive of increasing the effectiveness of knowledge workers. The fact that there are so many disagreements over the definition of a knowledge worker, their optimal working environment, how to manage them, among other points of contention, vivifies how much work is left to be done.
Richard Florida. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life; and The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent. Florida is another thinker contributing to the knowledge worker topic, though he labels it the creative class. While Baker has serious doubts about some of his proposals with respect to government “investing” in furthering creativity, his books are thought-provoking expositions of this important sector of the workforce, providing a global perspective on the coming competition for this type of talent.