DWD2020304

David's Time With Peter F. Drucker 2020.3.4 Eighty years ago, when these assumptions were first formulated, during and at the end of WWI, they conformed close enough to reality to be considered valid. Today every one of them has become untenable. The majority of people who work for an organization may still be employees of the organization. But a very large and steadily growing minority——though working for the organization——are no larger its employees, let alone its full-time employees. They work for an outsourcing contractor, for example, the outsourcing firm that provides maintenance in a hospital or a manufacturing plant, or the outsourcing firm that runs the data processing system for a government agency or a business. They are "temps" or part-timers. Increasingly they are individual contractors working on a retainer or for a specific contractual period; this is particularly true of the most knowledgeable and therefore the most valuable people working for the organization. Even if employed full-time by the organization, fewer and fewer people are "subordinates"——even in fairly low-level jobs. Increasingly they are "knowledge workers." And knowledge workers are not subordinates; they are "associates." For, once beyond the apprentice stage, knowledge workers must know more about their job than their boss does——or else they are no good at all. In fact, that they know more about their job than anybody else in the organization is part of the definition of knowledge workers.——《Management Challenges for the 21st Century·Chapter1》(Peter F.Drucker,1999)