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Even as early as the late 1980s, Tom Peters was finding striking
examples of the wealth that lies in communicating information. Peters
reported that the little publication called The Official Airline Guide—a
for-sale compilation of schedule information (information that the airlines
gave away free)—sold in 1988 for $750 million, three times the selling
price of Ozark Airlines that same year.
In other words, the right formula for collecting and communicating
free airline information was worth more than all the planes, equipment,
and other assets of an airline itself.
If collecting and communicating information is our main work for
today and tomorrow, we’d better get good at it. In a knowledge economy,
our personal success and the success of our organizations depend on this
“knowledge work.” Management guru Peter Drucker, writing in Managing
in the Next Century, put it this way: “Physical resources no longer
provide much of an advantage, nor does skill. Only the productivity of
knowledge workers makes a measurable difference.”
Unfortunately, however, most of us are not very good at communicating
our knowledge, and the results can be disastrous. W. Edwards
Deming, the twentieth century’s leading advocate for “quality” as a business
goal, estimated that “85 percent of failures in quality are failures in
communication.” A big part of the problem is the way we think about
communication. Too often we make third-wave communication decisions
as if we were still living in a first- or second-wave society.
In first- and second-wave societies, communication often was oneway,
top-down. Information was held at the very top of organizational pyramids and passed down to workers only as needed. Most of the time,
most people—whether they worked in a field or in a factory—needed to
be only passive receivers of communication.
Moreover, in first- and second-wave societies, communication
communities were small and uniform. A first-wave farmer may have
communicated with only a few hundred people in a lifetime, all people
very much like himself. A second-wave plant manager communicated
with more people, but that manager probably saw them as
interchangeable.
In their book, Thinking for a Living, Ray Marshall and Marc Tucker
pointed out that our educational system has not yet caught up with the
communication needs of a knowledge economy. “Schools’ curriculum
and methods,” they wrote, “are matched to the needs of a half-century
ago, rather than to today’s requirements. Fifty years ago, relatively few
students needed sophisticated communications skills, so students were
not required to write much and teachers were not asked to spend much
time working with them to improve what they wrote. Students are still
not required to write much and teachers are given very little time to help
them improve their writing.”