Unlock your company’s true potential by eliminating knowledge work waste that’s hiding in plain sight.Back in 1987, Nobel laureate Robert Solow quipped, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” This costly condition soon became known as the “productivity paradox.” Why does it persist today? Why do knowledge workers spend a third of their days on needless correction, avoidable work and overservice, despite existing office technology that could help, even automate, their actions? And why does nobody notice? The answers—and solutions—are in this book. The Knowledge Work Factory uncovers the well-intentioned waste that hides in plain sight within virtually every organization. It reveals the ingrained perceptual biases that trick our brains into accepting the status quo and missing breakthrough opportunities. It draws stunning parallels to industrial production, which cracked this very code over 100 years ago. Most importantly, it gives you an easy-to-follow, one-stop guide to boost efficiency, productivity, and morale among the very knowledge workers who struggle under the burden of the productivity paradox. Discover your organization’s true, untapped capacity. Maximize the productivity of every single knowledge worker. Uncover “better-than-best practices.” Reap benefits that drop straight to the bottom line. The power is in your hands—with The Knowledge Work Factory.

Addresses the following questions: What is knowledge work? What are strategies and methods for increasing productivity, quality, effectiveness and value of knowledge work? Can knowledge workers be managed, and if yes, how? What are adequate methods for measuring performance of knowledge workers?

Knowledge workers create the innovations and strategies that keep their firms competitive and the economy healthy. Yet, companies continue to manage this new breed of employee with techniques designed for the Industrial Age. As this critical sector of the workforce continues to increase in size and importance, that's a mistake that could cost companies their future. Thomas Davenport argues that knowledge workers are vastly different from other types of workers in their motivations, attitudes, and need for autonomy--and, so, they require different management techniques to improve their performance and productivity. Based on extensive research involving over 100 companies and more than 600 knowledge workers, Thinking for a Living provides rich insights into how knowledge workers think, how they accomplish tasks, and what motivates them to excel. Davenport identifies four major categories of knowledge workers and presents a unique framework for matching specific types of workers with the management strategies that yield the greatest performance. Written by the field's premier thought leader, Thinking for a Living reveals how to maximize the brain power that fuels organizational success. Thomas Davenport holds the President's Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College. He is director of research for Babson Executive Education; an Accenture Fellow; and author, co-author, or editor of nine books, including Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (HBS Press, 1997).

By some estimates, knowledge workers outnumber all other workers in North America alone by a four to one margin. Knowledge work and knowledge workers vary with each profession, depending on the industry - from software developers to engineers, architects to pharmaceutical researchers, and so forth. They are usually responsible for exploring and creating ideas, new products, new designs or perhaps new models for doing business to help their organization achieve or maintain a competitive advantage. As much of this type of work is intangible, productivity is a mystery to most business executives, managers and team leaders. This unique reference shows how to lead knowledge workers, manage knowledge work and build a hyper-productive knowledge work organization, by taming and managing the four flows of organizational performance (psychology, information, work and finance) to produce spectacular operational and financial throughput results. Inspired by his experience and knowledge gained at Borland International, where a hyper-productive level of performance was achieved resulting in the most productive software project ever documented, author Steve Tendon devised TameFlow. TameFlow is an approach that can be superimposed on any preexisting process, method, and practice to enable performance improvement by several orders of magnitude and a state of hyper-productivity. It is adaptable to nearly every industry, and can be applied to any knowledge work domain or organization that generates business value through knowledge. TameFlow blends and merges different ideas from a variety of schools of thought. It is founded in pattern theory and organizational performance patterns which are used to analyze and decompose processes, methodologies, and management practices into constituent parts to observe productivity patterns, and then they are recombined in new configurations to enable hyper-productive levels of performance. In this volume of The TameFlow Hyper-Productivity Series, the TameFlow approach is explained within the context of knowledge work performed in a software development organization. Mr. Tendon teams up with author, Wolfram Müller, a thought-leader and expert in Critical Chain and Advanced Agile Project Management to illustrate its application to Scrum, the most widely used Agile software project management framework, and to Kanban, a method used for knowledge work with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery and change management. Key Features ...

With the emergence of a new, powerful breed of organization--the knowledge organization--comes a bold challenge to the management of people. Employees with special cutting-edge knowledge and the ability to transform it into marketable goods and services cannot be managed in the old way. Only new ways and updated and adapted ways can work. Amar provides an in-depth understanding of who these knowledge workers are, and how to select, adapt, and develop new concepts, principles, strategies, and techniques to manage them effectively. With practical, ready-to-use assessment tools and instruments to redesign obsolescent management practices, this is an essential resource.

With the emergence of a new, powerful breed of organization--the knowledge organization--comes a bold challenge to the management of people. Employees with special cutting-edge knowledge and the ability to transform it into marketable goods and services cannot be managed in the old way. Only new ways and updated and adapted ways can work. Amar provides an in-depth understanding of who these knowledge workers are, and how to select, adapt, and develop new concepts, principles, strategies, and techniques to manage them effectively. With practical, ready-to-use assessment tools and instruments to redesign obsolescent management practices, this is an essential resource.

This book tells a story about an employee of a company that goes through Len Bertain's War on Waste. It describes the War on Waste and the role that all employees, not just the story hero, play in business success. But it adds another dimension with the inclusion of the role that knowledge, particularly Tribal Knowledge, plays in any corporation. But the real theme of this book is the discussion that of the "Tribal Knowledge Paradox." The owner of the business in the fictionalized story is the student of the book's illustrious consultant who leads him to an understanding of what it is. But why call it "The Tribal Knowledge Paradox?" What does Tribal Knowledge have to do with The War on Waste? It turns out that effective change requires an honest engagement of all people and a consequent understanding of the company Tribal Knowledge. But the real issue of the book is how companies deal with the Tribal Knowledge and the people who possess it. That is where the paradox arises. Tribal Knowledge is the collective wisdom of the organization. It is the sum of all the knowledge. It is the knowledge used to deliver, to support, or to develop value for customers. But it is also all the knowledge that is wrong, imprecise, and useless. It is knowledge of the informal power structure and process or how things really work and how they ought to. It is knowledge of who constrains the process and who facilitates it. It is the knowledge that is squirreled away by employees who feel a need to protect their jobs by not sharing the information needed to do a job. This is part of the totality of the Tribal Knowledge that is often abused by management. But a subtle issue has been discovered over the 25 years of delivering the War on Waste and that is the change of strategy that occurs from a War on Waste. How and why strategy changes is revealed. Enjoy the story.

“The 5 Choices provides the methods to get the right things done, not try to get everything done, and to feel like you made a meaningful contribution at the end of the day.” —Kevin Turner, former COO of Microsoft For fans of Deep Work, Great at Work, and the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The 5 Choices is an essential guide for understanding productivity and time-management in the 21st century. Every day brings us a crushing wave of demands: a barrage of texts, emails, interruptions, meetings, phone calls, tweets, breaking news—not to mention the high-pressure demands of our jobs—which can be overwhelming and exhausting. The sheer number of distractions can threaten our ability to think clearly, make good decisions, and accomplish what matters most, leaving us worn out and frustrated. From the business experts at FranklinCovey, The 5 Choices is an exploration of modern productivity. It offers powerful insights drawn from the latest neuroscience research and decades of experience in the time-management field to help you master your attention and energy management. The 5 Choices is time management redefined: through five fundamental choices, it increases the productivity of individuals, teams, and organizations, and empowers individuals to make selective, high-impact choices about where to invest their valuable time, attention, and energy. The 5 Choices—like “Act on the Important, Don’t React to the Urgent” and “Rule Your Technology, Don’t Let It Rule You”—will not only increase your productivity, but also provide a renewed sense of engagement and accomplishment. You will quickly find yourself moving beyond thinking, “I was so busy today, what did I actually accomplish?” to confidently realizing “I did everything I needed to accomplish today—and did it meaningfully.”

A timely investigation of the potential economic effects, both realized and unrealized, of artificial intelligence within the United States healthcare system. In sweeping conversations about the impact of artificial intelligence on many sectors of the economy, healthcare has received relatively little attention. Yet it seems unlikely that an industry that represents nearly one-fifth of the economy could escape the efficiency and cost-driven disruptions of AI. The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: Health Care Challenges brings together contributions from health economists, physicians, philosophers, and scholars in law, public health, and machine learning to identify the primary barriers to entry of AI in the healthcare sector. Across original papers and in wide-ranging responses, the contributors analyze barriers of four types: incentives, management, data availability, and regulation. They also suggest that AI has the potential to improve outcomes and lower costs. Understanding both the benefits of and barriers to AI adoption is essential for designing policies that will affect the evolution of the healthcare system.