Knowledge workers create the innovations and strategies that keep their firms competitive and the economy healthy. Yet companies continue to manage this new breed of employee with techniques designed for the Industrial Age. As this critical sector of the workforce continues to increase in size and importance, that’s a mistake that could cost companies their future. Thomas Davenport argues that knowledge workers are vastly different from other types of workers in their motivations, attitudes, and need for autonomy—and so they require different management techniques to improve their performance and productivity. Based on extensive research involving over one hundred companies and more than six hundred knowledge workers, Thinking for a Living provides rich insights into how knowledge workers think, how they accomplish tasks, and what motivates them to excel. Davenport identifies four major categories of knowledge workers and presents a unique framework for matching specific types of workers with the management strategies that yield the greatest performance. Written by the field’s premier thought leader, Thinking for a Living reveals how to maximize the brain power that fuels organizational success.

Yet despite the importance of knowledge workers to the economic success of countries, companies, and other groups, they haven't received sufficient attention. We know little about how to improve knowledge workers' performance, which is very unfortunate, because no less an authority than Peter Drucker has said that improving knowledge worker performance is the most important economic issue of the age. So I've chosen to write this book about how we can make knowledge workers more productive and effective at their Jobs.