人力资源管理专业外文译文.doc

Knowledge Workers Need Better Management Knowledge workers could perform much better if we only knew how to manage them, says Thomas Davenport. His suggestion: Dont treat them the all same, and measure them tactfully. They dont like to be told what to do. They enjoy more autonomy than other workers. Much of their work is invisible and hard to measure, because it goes on inside their heads or outside the office. They are a growing part of the U.S. workforce, and their skills are hard to replace. Theyre knowledge workers, and they are performing well below their potential because companies still dont know how to manage them, says Thomas Davenport, professor of information technology and management at Babson College, in Wellesley, Mass., and director of research for Babsons executive education program. Knowledge workers are going to be the primary force determining which economies are successful and which arent, he says. They are the key source of growth in most organizations. New products and services, new approaches to marketing, new business models—all these come from knowledge workers. So if you want your economy to grow, your knowledge workers had better be doing a good job. Yet after studying more than 100 companies and 600 individual knowledge workers, Davenport has come to the conclusion that the old dictum of hiring smart people and leaving them alone isnt the best way to get the most out of knowledge workers. As he writes in his latest book, Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers (Harvard Business School Press, July 2005), although knowledge workers cant be managed in the traditional sense of the word, you can intervene, but you cant do it in a heavy-handed, hierarchical way. Executive Editor Allan Alter has followed Davenports career from his days as a pioneering thinker on business process reengineering and knowledge management. He met with Davenport in his office at Babson Colleges School of Executive Edu