Marketing Strategy Management

manage non-routine tasks

by Kenneth Rudich

The labor market is squarely in the midst of experiencing radical change, and it will have a significant impact on future workforce needs.   

For the past thirty years, companies have been realizing tremendous boosts in productivity by reengineering and automating their core processes, then outsourcing everything else.  While early adopters of these practices frequently garnered a competitive-edge by being first, the ability to duplicate these strategies have since made them too commonplace to produce an advantage for anyone anymore, thereby forcing those in industry to seek new avenues for achieving competitive advantage.  This has resulted in an awakening of how important it is to be talent-rich with knowledge workers.   

the higher value worker

According to Bradford C. Johnson and his colleagues James M. Manyika and
Lareina A. Yee, reengineering, automating, and outsourcing eliminate activities
that prevent employees from undertaking higher value work.  For employers,
this has had the dual effect of bypassing the need for certain kinds of employees,
while precipitating a need for another kind of employee, in what might be
characterized as an evolutionary pattern that dates back to the industrial age.
Johnson and group have organized this evolutionary pattern into a progressively
graduated scale of worker categories (the predominant activity of the work
determines the category a given worker falls into):   

•   Transformational workers: extracting raw materials and converting them into
    finished goods, like those found in production jobs;
•   Transactional workers: interactions that unfold in a generally rule-based
    manner and can thus be scripted or automated;
•   Tacit workers: more complex interactions requiring a higher level of judgment,
    involving ambiguity; and drawing on tacit, experiential knowledge, and
    creative capacity.

Today’s most valuable worker belongs to the tacit category, performing what
economists call tacit interactions.  These interactions occur around the need
to get a bead on a complex situation and then make context-based decisions
for correctly handling it.  For instance, managers, sales people, and customer service
representatives may be required to orchestrate activities across an enterprise
network in which the workflow is comprised of both internal and external sources
of labor and resources.   

This is where the modern-day notion of the knowledge worker comes into play.  In
such a fluid environment, the skilled performance of this work is harder for
competitors to duplicate because it rests with the talents and abilities of
individuals to manage non-routine tasks, and to build trust and rapport among
loosely coupled teams of people with different backgrounds, skills, and
expertise.
 
The objective is to mount a collective effort that leads to achieving or
maintaining competitive advantage.  Doing so will rely on the capacity to
leverage opportunities for innovating how the work is accomplished — that is,
to provide added-value (or enrich the knowledge asset) by searching, monitoring,
learning, and devising ever-better solutions.
 
The ultimate is to move past merely orchestrating processes to orchestrating
innovation, wherein each spin on a concept uncovers a new and better way of
doing something, and that realization in turn stimulates another round of
innovation and growth.  In his book “The Free-Market Innovation Machine,”
economist William Baumol of Princeton University argues that this, simply, is
the nature of capitalism: “…innovative activity — which in other types of
economy is fortuitous and optional — becomes mandatory, a life-and-death matter
for the firm.”
 
These management ideas are hardly new or novel, says Scott Beardsley.  After all,
the labor market has always had workers who perform tacit interactions.  “But the
ever-increasing growth in their number and value,” he says, “is driving
companies to adopt such ideas more quickly and deeply.”   

A 2005 report issued by Johnson and his colleagues reinforces this assertion.
They note, “During the past six years, the number of U.S. jobs that include
tacit interactions as an essential component has been growing two and a half
times faster than the number of transactional jobs and three times faster than
employment in the entire national economy.  To put it another way, 70% of all
U.S. jobs created since 1998 — 4.5 million or roughly the combined workforce of
the 56 largest public companies by market capitalization — require judgment and
experience.”
 
They also add, “Workers who undertake complex, interactive jobs typically
command higher salaries, and their actions have a disproportionate impact on the
ability of companies to woo customers, to compete, and to earn profits.”   

individual marketability

As the composition of the workforce continues to expand in this direction,
it becomes evermore necessary for individuals to keep pace with it. 
While knowing something is one form of knowledge, the talent to capably
apply it is quite another.  The latter requires the development of cognitive
skills to go along with the knowing, so as to effect a meaningful integration
of the two.  It’s a matter of continually auditing your own skill set with questions
like what kind of knowledge will keep me current, who needs it or can use it,
how much is needed to remain market competitive, and how can I most
effectively apply it?  

In the end, it’s about satisfying the appetite for a workforce that is
talent-rich with knowledge workers.

Related posts:

1. interdisciplinary studies…what, why? – part 2
2. u.s. labor force shortfall of educated workers by 2020?