Employees - The Knowledge Processors

New industries have emerged and some have been transformed by the knowledge economy, but the whole workforce has undergone a metamorphosis as well. The majority of the workforce in most industries in developed economies is comprised of knowledge workers - workers who apply their brainpower and skills to process information into applicable knowledge to make new products. The knowledge economy gives real meaning to the business motto "Our people are our most valuable assets." Because the generation of new knowledge and innovation creates value, organizations need employees who can process the vast body of information available into applicable knowledge. And employees need to be enabled, or to use a term more in vogue, empowered, to activate their ideas and creativity.

This is in sharp contrast to the profile of the ideal worker of the industrial economy. The ideal worker then was one who operated machines in the most efficient way on a production line. That is not to say brainpower was unimportant in the industrial economy, which created some of the greatest inventions. Brain work, however, was limited to those who worked primarily in R&D laboratories, engineering, or marketing departments. Not only was brain work limited within an organization to certain departments and sometimes to certain employees in that department, but also the demand for innovation was much lower.

Having a limited number of brain workers will not work in an economy where you need 3,000 ideas to get one commercially successful product,17 and where you have to plan for the maturing of your products shortly after launching them. The organization needs the contribution of every mind it has access to, in order to meet the high demand for new ideas, or it will run out of raw resources. The ideal worker now is one who innovates, brainstorms ideas, shares knowledge, thinks, contemplates, and experiments. It is not enough to limit the innovative activity to the R&D department any more. A good idea from the marketing department or administrative staff may save the organization a substantial amount of time and money, which will be detailed later on in Chapter 7. A vital component in employee job descriptions now includes terminology for the creation, application, transfer, and commercialization of knowledge.

In the industrial economy, salaries and wages were considered a production cost and knowl­edge and training were provided only on a need basis. This is strikingly different from what business now demands from its workforce, and in turn what the knowledge worker expects from the workplace. Salaries and wages are now seen, at least by some, to be more of an investment in one of the most important intellectual resources of the enterprise. As such, learning, continuous training, and development becomes an essential tool in building strategic competencies.

Whether in the industrial or the knowledge economy, people are people. In the former, management concerned itself with machines more than with people to optimize production.

Machines that could be operated easily were the main tools of production. Though machines are still very important in the knowledge economy, the main tool of production now is the human mind, a "machine" that operates under a chaotic set of rules, if any. Generally speaking, operating even the most complicated of machines is possible. They come with instructions human minds don't. How do you make minds work or stop? How do you maintain and improve them?

As if that was not enough complexity for business managers in the knowledge economy to deal with, minds do not come alone. Minds come with hearts and aspirations, and offer another challenge for management: how to motivate knowledge workers to innovate? How to manage the social aspects of knowledge creation while maintaining efficiency? All this means that not only are the raw materials intellectual, but also the production process is dependent on intellectual processes. In the knowledge economy, the demand for the new and sophisticated is very high. This is because both consumers and customers have also been transformed by the knowledge economy.