Competitive Edge
Forget the recession. At least for a moment. According to Harvard Magazine, the “real problem, obscured by this acute, cyclical downturn, may be a long-term erosion of competitiveness in a more challenging global economic era.”
Photo by Alfred T. Palmer: Flickr Commons
The United States came strong out of the gate after World War II, but the past four decades have seen a slow decline in performance relative to the world. Harvard has therefore launched a U.S. Competitiveness Project to research and “address comprehensively the country’s economic strengths (innovation and entrepreneurship, for instance, and research universities) and shortcomings (deteriorating worker skills, complex tax and regulatory systems and fractious federal policymaking).”
The issue of national competitiveness is enormous and complicated, and Peter Drucker viewed it from many angles. But one area central to his analysis was knowledge work. In Drucker’s view, only knowledge work, and the new industries it creates, could keep developed economies wealthy relative to their competitors. “It should already be clear that the new technologies with the industries based on them are the only means for today’s developed countries—above all, the United States—to maintain their present standards of living and economic health,” Drucker noted in The Age of Discontinuity.
On the bright side, the United States could boast a comparatively strong education system—at least in the 1960s, when Drucker wrote the following in The Effective Executive: “American education may leave a good deal to be desired, but it is massive beyond anything poorer countries can afford.” Since higher education was made so widely available following World War II, the United States had an enormous head start when it came to human capital. For at least 40 years, Drucker estimated in Managing in the Next Society, published in 2002, the nation would have “a substantial supply of something that is not easily created overnight: knowledge workers.”
On the dark side, however, Drucker lamented how far we were from understanding how knowledge workers should spend their time. Many of them are bogged down by paperwork, for example, instead of maximizing their unique skills. “Today’s knowledge workers are probably less productive than in the past because their schedules are filled with activities that don’t reflect their training or talent,” Drucker asserted. “Only the productivity of knowledge workers makes a measurable difference—and right now it is poor.”
Is improving knowledge worker productivity the key to U.S. competitiveness?
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4 Comments
Sergio
September 18, 2012This question reminds me of two thoughts from Deming and Drucker. Peter Drucker’s take on productivity was the following:
Drucker reminds us that the equation of productivity includes capital, labor, physical resources and time. So in addition to boosting knowledge worker productivity, I wonder if there are better ways to maximize the yield from our investment dollar for example? Are there more efficient and effective ways to manage our natural resources? Does the 20th century’s 9am-5pm work mindset conflict with knowledge worker effectiveness (which may lead to burnout increase in rework and ultimately a drop in worker productivity). As is mentioned in the last paragraph of this post, my point is to emphasize that knowledge worker productivity is just one of the variables in the productivity equation, and we should not attempt to optimize each of them without consideration for the whole.
Regarding Deming, he said the following regarding competition:
This raises the interesting question of what we mean by increasing a nation’s “competitiveness”? The answer may conflict with the global “system” that helped it to reach this status in the first place.
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September 20, 2012[...] Dx Comment of the Week: Yesterday, when we asked whether knowledge worker supremacy was the key to restoring U.S. competitiveness, reader Sergio, [...]
What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading | The Drucker Institute
September 21, 2012[...] Dx Comment of the Week: Yesterday, when we asked whether knowledge worker supremacy was the key to restoring U.S. competitiveness, reader Sergio, [...]
Maverick18
September 22, 2012Every improvement in information technology adds to the productivity of knowledge workers. The problem is that the increased productivity of knowledge workers has led to structural unemployment and has not been sufficient to make the US more competitive. All the good things about our American society have attracted students and knowledge workers from around the world and really have more to with America’s competitiveness than anything else. Unfortunately, we burden ourselves with Government spending levels that drain our intenational competitiveness because they provide so little added value. Also unfortunate is the degree to which the benfits of our productivity are diminished by Asians who steal our intellectual property with impunity. Yet, our electorate reports that they are continually becoming worse off, but are not inclined to demand a major reformation of Government. This is what economists call an “unstable system.”