Productive Knowledge Workers Run on Curiosity: Adrian Wooldridge

The great management guru Peter Drucker believed that the biggest management challenge of the 21st century is improving the productivity of knowledge workers. “Workers by brain” are relentlessly replacing “workers by hand” as the dynamos of the modern economy, he argued. Thus, the most valuable companies (Google, Microsoft and the rest) are almost all knowledge- rather than resource intensive. Yet we have little idea about how to make them happy and productive.

The average rate of productivity growth is significantly lower in post-industrial societies than it was in industrial societies. The bloated public sector employs ever more paper-shufflers. And productivity ...