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A man with a stopwatch

In 1899, at the Bethlehem Steel Company in Pennsylvania, an engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor picked out a labourer to study: a man he called Schmidt in his writing, whose real name was Henry Noll. Noll's job was to load pig iron — rough cast-iron ingots, about ninety-two pounds each — onto rail cars. Taylor timed every component of the task, worked out how much rest a strong man's body needed between exertions, and retrained Noll to work to a schedule dictated from outside rather than from his own sense of his body. Reported output rose from around twelve and a half tons a day to something like forty-seven.

Taylor ran a second study in the same yard: the gangs used one shovel for every material, from four-pound scoops of coal to thirty-pound scoops of ore. He worked out that output peaked around twenty-one or twenty-two pounds a shovelful regardless of material, supplied a range of shovels sized to the job, and the workforce needed to move the same tonnage fell from around six hundred men to about a hundred and forty.

This was scientific management, and for a while it looked like it might travel from the rail yard into the office too. In the 1910s, an American writer named William Henry Leffingwell timed typists, filing clerks and mail-sorters and redesigned desks to shorten the distance a stenographer's hands had to travel — “scientific office management.” Where a clerical job really was a repeated, external, watchable motion, the method worked about as well as it had for shovelling. Where it wasn't, it stalled, because there was nothing left to time.

Drucker names the thing that doesn't fit

By the middle of the twentieth century, Peter Drucker had spent twenty years watching large organisations try to run their offices on factory logic and noticing that the fit was poor. In 1959, in The Landmarks of Tomorrow, he named the mismatch: a new kind of employee, working with ideas, information and judgement rather than hands and materials. He called this person the knowledge worker, and the shift — economies moving from manual to knowledge-based work as their main source of value — the knowledge economy.

In The Effective Executive (1967), he drew the distinction that follows directly from the four invisibles below: efficiency — doing things right, more output per unit of input on a given task — versus effectiveness — doing the right things, choosing which task deserves the effort at all. For Noll, the right thing to do was already settled; only how well he did it was in question. For a knowledge worker, a blisteringly efficient hour spent on the wrong task, while the thing that actually mattered quietly slips its deadline, is a bad week executed extremely well.

He kept returning to the same worry for the rest of his career — The Age of Discontinuity (1969), Post-Capitalist Society (1993) — and by Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999) had sharpened it into a direct comparison: the great achievement of twentieth-century management had been to raise manual-worker productivity by something like fifty times over. The equivalent task for knowledge work was “still almost entirely unsolved” — and would matter to the wealth of nations at least as much as manual productivity had mattered to the last one.

You cannot time a decision. You cannot hand someone else the choice of task. You cannot inspect a head. The whole discipline Taylor built was an answer to a question knowledge work doesn't ask.