Futuríveis

More generally, standardisation and automation, the established tools of productivity improvement, are unlikely to yield results when tacit workers are involved. Management must shift its focus from efficiency to effectiveness, which requires changing from measures of output to measures of outcome, fostering organisational change, learning, collaboration and innovation.

Understanding tacit interactions is important not only in business but also in the public and nonprofit sectors – wherever activities are specialised and people interact, worker to worker. With due respect to Drucker, the management of workers (knowledge or otherwise) involved with transformations and transactions is now relatively well understood; increasing the effectiveness of tacit interactions is not; it is the biggest management challenge – and perhaps the biggest opportunity – of the modern era.

*McKinsey examined the performance of 8,000 companies across several sub-sectors and found that as tacit interaction intensity increases from low (less than 14 per cent of economic activity) to high (greater than 62 per cent), performance differentials between top and bottom quartile performing companies increases significantly. An analysis using revenue growth yields shows similar performance differentials.

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