qualityview

by Dirk Dusharme

The knowledge worker is a highly developed and noninterchangeable employee.


Futurist and author Alvin Toffler analyzes contemporary social change. His books, written in collaboration with his spouse, Heidi Toffler, have been published in some 30 languages. They include Future Shock, The Third Wave and Creating a New Civilization, and combine insights from such fields as family life, technology, politics, business and the media. The Tofflers have introduced new concepts in social theory and even added new words to the dictionary.

In this interview with the Tofflers, we discuss the concept of knowledge workers and their impact on today's workplace. Unlike the plug-and-play worker of the industrial era, the knowledge worker is a highly developed and noninterchangeable employee.

QD: In The Third Wave, you refer to the knowledge worker. Explain this new breed of worker.
A. Toffler: For the last 40 years or so, the United States and other countries have seen a decline in muscle work, or the shift of muscle work to low-wage countries just starting their industrialization process. In its place have come knowledge jobs (or mind jobs).

Knowledge workers are a group that we define rather broadly, and that includes not just nuclear physicists and rocket scientists, but also the people working in the services-people who know how to organize, how to keep things running and have other kinds of skills, including psychological skills, human skills and so on. So, basically we're saying that there are valuable skills apart from your musculature, and that's new in history, by and large. There were always a few knowledge workers, but most people worked their muscles.
H. Toffler: The fact is, however, that muscle work will not completely go away. One of the points about our wave metaphor is that, because a new wave of change comes in, it doesn't completely wipe out the old ones. We still need people with muscles to carry packages. We still need laborers in the construction industry. Muscle power will not go away completely. But it plays a much-reduced role in the entire system.

For instance, one of the first things the Japanese told us many, many years ago at a Nissan plant when they showed us a state-of-the-art robotized factory was that the great thing about robotic systems is that they don't take coffee breaks. They work 24 hours a day. They don't complain, and they're much more efficient. But, at that time, Japan also employed women to open the doors at department stores. They still do things that use inefficient labor. The point is, fewer and fewer people earn their living doing that muscle work.

QD: You maintain that workers were interchangeable during the industrial wave.
A. Toffler: Right, because if someone worked on an assembly line and had a heart attack and dropped dead, they'd plug in another worker in three minutes flat. And the reason for that was there were no skills involved-anybody could do it.
H. Toffler: And the mass education system was designed to produce lightly lettered workers who could do fine in the factory. They didn't need to be well-educated. As a matter of fact, if you were well-educated, you were not hired. You were "overqualified."

QD: Now, on the other hand, if today's highly educated knowledge worker is not interchangeable, what effect does that have on downsizing?
A. Toffler: Downsizing has been carried out in an absolutely second-rate, mass fashion. You know, "Let's cut by 10 percent." Why is 10 percent the right number? I believe many of these companies that have made such savage cuts are going to suffer for it. There are already reports that they're not achieving the results and profits that they expected. But they will suffer long-term damage because it was done, by and large, in an absolutely inhuman and mechanized way, treating all of these people as a class rather than as individuals. It doesn't take into account the demoralizing effect on the remaining workers. It doesn't take into account the loss of certain kinds of institutional memory that's important.
H. Toffler: In Silicon Valley, they found out that they were letting go of some of their best people. They tried to get them back and couldn't. Knowledge workers take with them the knowledge of their job. Some of those people were very valuable, and those companies couldn't measure who the really valuable and productive people were.
A. Toffler: It also doesn't take into account the "teamness" that had previously been developed. It's not just because of knowledge and specialization that you no longer simply take a worker and put him or her on the line. That worker also must integrate with a team. And, if you take one person out of the team, it changes the team. So all of those considerations went by the board in the pursuit of the magic stock price. And those companies will find out that they have made a bargain with the devil.

QD: Yet, because of technology, a certain amount of downsizing is inevitable, right?
A. Toffler: Yes, sure. But, you know, employment levels are not one-to-one related to technology. In the early 1970s, we had higher unemployment rates than the Japanese, but the Japanese had better and more advanced technology in their factories than we did. And the English were way behind technologically and had the highest unemployment rates. What does that say? That social policy, economic policy, some macroeconomics, but not just macro-economics affect employment levels, perhaps even more than technology does.

QD: You talk about individualism and mass customization. How will that affect quality?
A. Toffler: It will compel a complete demassification of the criteria. And, in fact, some researchers are already talking about tailoring quality. Tailoring quality is where it will go if it wants to stay relevant because we're tailoring everything else. And that is related to the question of functionality. A product has quality if it serves the customer's requirements, but the customer's requirements may not be what you think they are.

Unless you know intimately whether a kid buys an eraser because it smells good or to erase with, you can make the best eraser in the world and put a lot of effort into improving the production of a highly effective erasing machine, but it may not be what the customer is buying it for.

In order to determine the criteria, you must go beyond factory production runs and the mechanics of all this and get deeply into the functions that this product is designed to perform-what peripheral, secondary or even previously unnoticed functions it has.

When automobiles were produced, nobody thought that they were going to provide venues for sex. Nevertheless, that became a consideration in the early days. There's a whole sociology written about this. So, are we buying the car to get from here to there, to show off to our neighbors or to provide a venue for something else?

In some cases, the dominant function is quite evident. Nobody's going to pay a huge sum for an automobile to smell the new-car smell. But, the principle is, again, that the chair I sit in has many functions. Sitting on it is only one. I could put a board on top of the chair, and it becomes a table. You could use it to bash somebody over the head, and it becomes a weapon.

We must understand the criteria that we're using to determine whether the product fulfills its mission. And, if we don't define quality as producing a service or a good that fulfills the customer's needs, then what's it for?