“Leadership rests on being able to do something others cannot . . .”

“Leadership rests on being able to do something others cannot do at all or find difficult to do even poorly. It rests on core competencies that meld market or customer value with a special ability of the producer or supplier.

Some examples: the ability of the Japanese to miniaturize electronic components, which is based on their three-hundred-year-old artistic tradition of putting landscape paintings on a tiny lacquered box; or the almost unique ability GM has had for eighty years to make successful acquisitions. . . .

. . . Knowledge workers own the means of production. It is the knowledge between their ears. And it is a totally portable and enormous capital asset.

Because knowledge workers own their means of production, they are mobile. Manual workers need the job much more than the job needs them. It may still not be true for all knowledge workers that the organization needs them more than they need the organization. But for most of them it is a symbiotic relationship in which the two need each other in equal measure.

Management’s duty is to preserve the assets of the institution in its care. What does this mean when the knowledge of the individual knowledge worker becomes an asset and, in more and more cases, the main asset of an institution? What does this mean for personnel policy? What is needed to attract and to hold the highest-producing knowledge workers? What is needed to increase their productivity and to convert their increased productivity into performance capacity for the organization?”