During the mid-1980’s, United Technologies Corporation (UTC) ran a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal with the headline: “Let’s get rid of Management.” At the time more and more employees were being classified as “knowledge workers,” a term coined way back in 1959 by visionary business thinker Peter Drucker to describe people whose jobs involved more than routine manual labour.
Since that ad ran, the number of knowledge workers in the US has more than doubled. But even more than 30 years later, most businesses still don’t seem to understand the idea that “people don’t want to be managed.”
