Learning Objectives
This webcast addresses what every company must know about knowledge workers and how to manage them. Knowledge workers create the innovations and strategies that keep their firms competitive and the economy healthy. Yet companies continue to manage this new breed of employee with techniques designed for the Industrial Age. As this critical sector of the workforce continues to increase in size and importance, that's a mistake that could cost companies their future.
Program content
In his new book Thinking for a Living and this webcast, Tom Davenport argues that knowledge workers are vastly different from other types of workers in their motivations, attitudes, and need for autonomy--and so they require different management techniques to improve their performance and productivity. Based on extensive research involving over one hundred companies and more than six hundred knowledge workers, Thinking for a Living provides rich insights into how knowledge workers think, how they accomplish tasks, and what motivates them to excel. Davenport identifies four major categories of knowledge workers and presents a unique framework for matching specific types of workers with the management strategies that yield the greatest performance. He describes a variety of interventions into knowledge work—involving technology, the knowledge workplace, management styles, and other changes—that can make knowledge workers extremely effective.
About Thomas H. Davenport
Tom Davenport holds the president's chair in the Information Technology Management Division at Babson College and is director of research for the School of Executive Education (SEE) at Babson. At SEE, he is the academic director of the Institute for Process Management and Working Knowledge research programs.
He is an Accenture Fellow and has taught at Harvard Business School, University of Chicago, Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, and University of Texas at Austin. He has directed research centers at Ernst & Young, McKinsey & Company, and CSC Index. Davenport wrote, co-wrote or edited 10 books, including the first books on business process reengineering, knowledge management, and the business use of enterprise systems. He has written hundreds of articles and columns for such publications as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, Financial Times, Information Week and CIO. His most recent book, What's the Big Idea: Creating and Capitalizing on the Best Management Thinking, was named one of the three best books of the Spring 2003 season by Fortune magazine. In 2003, he was named one of the top 25 consultants in the world by Consulting magazine.
Davenport's areas of expertise are in business intelligence, knowledge management and knowledge worker productivity, enterprise systems and process management.
