Management and Metrics - II

After the previous post, I literally said out loud "I have to blog about this", marked the page, and put it down.

I should have kept reading. Here is the contents of the very next paragraph:

... For it is abundantly clear that knowledge cannot be productive unless the knowledge worker finds out who he is himself, and what kind of work he is fitted for, and how he works best. There can be no divorce of planning from doing in knowledge work. On the contrary, the knowledge worker must be able to plan himself. Present entrance jobs, by and large, do not make this possible. They are based on the assumption - valid to some extent for manual work but quite inappropriate to knowledge work - that an outside expert such as the industrial engineer or work-study specialist can objectively determine the one best way for any kind of work to be done. For knowledge work, this is simply not true. There may be one best way, but it is heavily conditioned by the individual and not entirely determined by physical, or even mental, characteristics of the job. It is temperamental as well.

Does this sound familiar? In other words, "there are no best practices. Practices are better or worse in a given context."

But what about all those books that say you have to have a defined, stable, repeatable, managed, institutionalized process?

Having a shared set of expectations between staff and management will reduce friction, and I'm for it -- don't get me wrong.

But sometimes, the best use for books like that is as a doorstop, or maybe firewood.