Story:
Bribing the Knowledge Worker?

Turning employees into real partners may simply mean to give the power to the people who deserve it. Since capital is not anymore the key resource in the knowledge economy, but knowledge, it should be only natural that the power also flows from those who hold capital to those who hold the knowledge and expertise to make organizations successful.

Classic knowledge driven businesses such as management consultancies and law-firms have known and applied this principle for decades/centuries. People (apart from those who just want a brief career- & cv-boost and then quickly move on) don’t join major consultancies or law firms just for the financial rewards, but to have a career as a professional and eventually become a partner with the resulting status, social recognition and social power. Also, the real financial rewards only come with being a partner and owner of the business, before that – even if you are paid a good salary – you don’t really participate fully in the value you create. (That’s part of the system and the senior partners were here before those who joined the organization at later stages and created the system for the junior partners to move in. It actually works very much like the medieval craftman’s shop.)

Drucker also noted that today, most corporations are still trying to maintain the traditional mind-set, in which capital is the key resource and the one who controls the capital is the boss, while bribing knowledge workers to be content to remain employees by giving them bonuses and stock options. This approach is very likely to be not sustainable, since even if it can work in the first place for some time, which I seriously doubt, because knowledge workers work for recognition & power and only at a secondary level for money, it cannot work in the long run.

There are two key reasons for this.

First, every stock market downturn (and history shows that the next downturn is always around the corner...) will wipe out the value of all of these stock options and demotivate all those who counted on them for a prosperous future.

Second, if the development of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century provides us with any useful patterns to recognize, the next major industries that are going to result from the big technological leaps we are likely to make in the coming 10 years, are probably going to behave far more like traditional „old economy“ industries in the 19th century, that took years of painful hard work to establish themselves. Therefore stock options will simple not create financial value fast enough, and even if there was plenty of money around to give abundant bonuses,  this will not be enough to bribe knowledge workers and knowledge technologists to contribute 15 or 20 years of their precious lives to building someone else’s business.