The Division of Knowledge Work

Most managers and owners of manufacturing plants and labor driven workforces might be familiar with the principles discussed in the ‘division of labour’ chapter of Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations.’ Just to remind ourselves, it reads a little something like this:

1. A pin maker, unknowing of the concepts of division of labour can very best make one pin per day by themselves.

2. Dividing the labor of making a pin involves a system where:

“One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head. To make the head requires two or three distinct operations… etc etc etc.”

3. “In some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.”

4. Employing this division of labour, a team of 10 pin makers can make up to 4800 pins per day.

Now let’s take this concept and bring it into our modern industry, where each of us is applying our knowledge to perform our job and this knowledge is exploited to produce wealth for our given nation. Should we divide our knowledge based work? Should we be fearful of knowledge workers from lower cost countries taking our jobs? Or do we learn to adapt and become orchestrators of low-cost (but still good quality) knowledge? Let’s think about it.

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What will be the major concern of the knowledge revolution?

Dodig-Crnkovic (2003) states:

The industrial revolution was concerned with the utilizing of energy.

The information revolution, is concerned with the utilizing of information.

With these in mind, what will the knowledge revolution be remembered for?

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Knowledge, Intelligence, Wisdom and … Grok

From Robert A. Heinlein‘s novel ‘Stranger in a Strange Land:’

“Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man.”

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Knowledge Bartering?

Bartering systems have been around since the beginning of time and might be referred to as the father of all business transactions. In a nutshell, a bartering system is a system where goods or services are exchanged for other goods or services of a different nature.

When I think of this, my mind wanders to images of a caveman (loin cloth, unkempt beard and homemade baton inclusive) trading a well crafted hunting spear, with his neighbour, for a beard comb; perhaps made from the overgrown canine of a sabre tooth tiger that he’d developed quite a skill in manufacturing.

Fast forward to the neuveo-hippie era that we are currently in where car pooling and recycling are not just hip but are realistically cost efficient it is no surprise that local exchange trading systems, or LETS, are starting to spawn all over the place. The Times Online reported that 100,000 Britons have joined such schemes.

Just to clarify what LETS exactly entails, here is the definition from the Wikipedia page on LETS:

”
1. Local people set up a club to trade between themselves, keeping their own record of accounts.

2. A directory of members’ offers and requests—goods, services or items for hire, priced in local LETS units—is compiled and circulated.

3. Members use the directory to contact one another whenever they wish. They pay for any service or goods by writing a LETS cheque or credit note for an agreed amount of LETS units, or by exchanging printed LETS notes.

4. If applicable, the credit note is sent to the LETS bookkeeper who adjusts both members’ accounts accordingly.
”

In other words, members of the LETS ‘pay it forward’ by carrying out services for the community which they can later ‘cash in’ on. Such examples in the UK have seen plumbing, gardening, babysitting and even miscellaneous odd jobs around the house traded via such a system.

So in comes my mind wondering about whether knowledge can be traded in such a system? After all, most advanced economies are shifting, if not already shifted to, a knowledge economy and it is becoming more and more common to pay people who ‘know which button to press’ rather than paying people to ‘press a button.’ Could we pay someone to tell us which button to press on our machine while we offer them knowledge, in return, of how to make their machines more efficient and cost effective? To place it more realistically I could indeed imagine a lawyer offering advice on a real estate transaction to a Realtor while in return the Realtor pays the lawyer back at a later date by offering advice on which location would be a wise choice to purchase property at.

Could it work in your industry? Maybe the next round of web 2.0 websites will enable this to happen. We will see.
As far back as I can remember, Experts Exchange, has always been a part of the world wide web even prior to the huge (and still largely undefined) web 2.0 movement. when they first started I recall that they had a points system where users were allowed to view answers to questions based on how many answers they had given themselves. That has since changed and now is subscribed to via monthly, yearly or various other plans. Did the model fail? Or did Experts Exchange realise they can make more money by charging corporate users who just need answers and unfortunately don’t have the time to share their knowledge? Then there are sites like rentacoder.com. Would it be possible to see rentacoder.com move away from hooking up buyers and service providers of software to traders of software components instead?

It is all definitely food for thought and if someone does know of more, better and clearer examples of where this is actually happening in the public domain I’d love to see them!

I’ll leave this post with a link to LetNet Milton Keynes. Do take a look at: http://www.mkletnet.org.uk/.

Mark

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