The Knowledge Revolution Means Your Boss Knows Almost Nothing

The knowledge economy has made us all more ignorant and changed the role of management.

Assume that over the last 500 years, the sum of human knowledge has been doubling every generation: that means there is over a million times more knowledge available to us. Good news, except of course, we are now much more ignorant in a relative way. An educated person 500 years ago might have known 10% of what there was to know.

We do not know 10% of the vastly enhanced sum of human knowledge. We may know 0.007% of human knowledge. Put it another way: if your boss is average, he or she is 99.993% ignorant and becoming more ignorant by the day, relative to the growing sum of human knowledge.

In the old days, the bosses had the brains, workers had the hands. Bosses no longer have a monopoly on brains. We are all islands of deep expertise in a vast ocean of knowledge. The job of the manager is to build bridges between all these islands of expertise and help the experts discover the best answer. Out goes the old hierarchy, in comes the network. The job of the manager changes completely from command and control, to co-ordinate, integrate, encourage and influence. It is a much harder job.

Management has always been about making things happen. That used to mean issuing orders. In the knowledge economy managers still need to make things happen, through people over whom they have no control: people in other departments and other companies. The job of management has become much harder, but much more interesting. The knowledge economy means deep specialization and relative ignorance about the total sum of human knowledge. We may be more ignorant, but we need to be far smarter to manage successfully in the knowledge economy.