Are All Employees Knowledge Workers?

So ask John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davis on the HBR Blog Network:

Their conclusion? If the goal is to mobilize the workforce:

We will begin to redefine all jobs...in ways that facilitate problem solving, experimentation, and tinkering. This will foster more widespread performance improvement. Everyone, even the most unskilled worker, will be viewed as a critical problem-solver and knowledge-worker contributing to performance improvement.

But, there is another kind of boundary that inhibits talent development. With few exceptions, executives immediately narrow the scope of discussion to their own employees. Yet, if we take talent development seriously, we begin to realize that, in the words of Bill Joy, "There are always more smart people outside your company than within it." If we are serious about developing our own talent, we must find more ways to connect with and collaborate with all of those smart people outside our organization. We should aggressively create opportunities for people within our organization to work together with leading edge talent outside our organization so that both sides can develop their talent even more rapidly. In driving scalable learning, we must expand our horizons far beyond the boundaries of our own firm.