This is an essay of surprises.

I say that not because I think this is a particularly brilliant piece of writing, but because the insights themselves (as well as the particular circumstances which precipitated them) all came about in rather unexpected ways. This is no longer the essay I had originally intended to write. This paper took, as it were, a will of its own and I, with little trepidation, am welcoming it. I had always been fascinated by Druckers idea of the knowledge worker, the one who puts to work the concepts, ideas and theories he has learned in systematic education as opposed to the man who is limited to putting to work manual skill or muscle. After being exposed to his works not too long ago, I almost immediately looked at every corporate and organizational context with that model in mind. Drucker wrote in his Management Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices of certain periods in the study of management. First was the Heroic Age of Management or the fifty years before World War II where management was studied by a few men and women working mostly in isolation and sustained by vision and faith rather than by public acclaim, in Druckers own words. Second was the Management Boom of the twenty-five years between World War II and 1970, where management was popularized, disseminated and made effective over most of the world. He admits, however, that this really described most of the developed world. In developing countries the phenomenon of management has had yet to make as substantial an impact as in their more developed counterparts. The Philippines is one such country where the ideas and trends of the management boom were generally beyond reach at the time. Seeking to recover from the ravages and destruction wrought by the Second World War the Philippine government was forced to employ nationalist economics wherein imports were kept at a bare minimum and local production and agriculture was maximized. Government was big owning, subsidizing and regulating almost all major industries. At a pragmatic level it seemed to work, until President Diosdado Macapagal, predecessor to the late Ferdinand Marcos and father of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, liberalized the market prematurely during his term. The Philippine economy had been on general decline from then on, and made only worse with Marcos imposition of Martial Law in 1972. By 1987 the Philippines had begun a new republic. Presently, twenty-five years on, Philippine society has already grown to become a state that is much more modern and metropolitan in its thinking than at any other time in its entire history, even more than when the Americans had colonized it in the first half of the 20th century. Due mostly to the twin forces of drastic globalization and dramatic advancements in information technology in the past decade, this new metropolitanization of developed countries such as the Philippines has paved the way for new ideas and ways of management to be discussed freely in the public square, primarily through social media and, to a lesser extent, the academe. By some fortunate unintended consequence of history, there is one distinct advantage of being born and raised in a developing country like the Philippines that should interest the Drucker reader. And that is that here we get to witness not just one management boom within our time, but two: The first is the boom that we missed out on well-nigh half a century ago. The second, on the other hand, is the boom that is brewing now, which is separate and distinct from the previous one. These

two waves of management thought may be expressed alternatively as revolutions of the concept of the knowledge worker. Here are some of their distinctives: 1) The first knowledge worker revolution strove to rise out of the industrial age but, limited by the technology of their time, succeeded only to push until a later but definitely more advanced level of that same industrial age, reaching the end of the 20th century. This second knowledge worker revolution has already arrived at the digital-globalized or wireless age, which now presents unique advantages in communication, transportation and culture that simply were not available before. 2) The first knowledge worker revolution immediately following the Second World War had to do with the dichotomy between the manual worker and the knowledge worker, with Drucker likening it to hammer or sickle vis--vis high-level abstraction and application of symbols. This second knowledge worker revolution has to do with the dichotomy between the knowledge worker who thrives in one particular industry vis--vis the knowledge worker who thrives in several kinds of industries. In the first knowledge worker revolution the knowledge worker was indeed, as the name implies, knowledgeable. This knowledge enables him to be agile and versatile in terms of effectively responding to the varied and changing demands of work with relative ease and consistency. But the silent presumption has always been that he is agile and versatile within his own given industry. It had never been contemplated that his flexibility would extend across several and/or different industries, much less if he did work for these industries at the same time. In the second knowledge worker revolution the knowledge worker has become equipped and prepared to avail of any number of the following options: 1) Working in ones general or specialized field of choice; 2) Working in several general and/or specialized fields at the same time; and 3) Working in vastly different specialized fields one after another. Of course, this is not unique to contemporary times. People in the past could have done the same things. But it would have been the exception rather than the rule at the time. For the average reasonable knowledge worker (which we are primarily concerned about), and not even counting the highly technically skilled workers, mobility in job markets was much more rigid in the industrial age than how it seems for us today in wireless times. In fact, during the first revolution if both a knowledge worker and a manual worker lost their jobs at the same time, it was the manual worker who stood a better chance at finding re-employment than the knowledge worker who had always been in one particular kind of industry. How is the reversal of this trend possible? My attempt at answering this question has really been helped by the fact that these two revolutionary strands have happened and are still happening consecutively the Philippines and also in other developing countries. In the Philippines more than half of its graduates do not have jobs that directly or legalistically correspond to the label of their

finished degree. And although it does seem to be the height of immodesty, I submit that this represents the new knowledge worker of the times. In the Philippines there are at least three major reasons for how this has developed: 1) The emphasis on general education as the backbone in Philippine schools curricula produces not just specialists in various fields, but also very capable generalists. I remember when I first started out in Nursing school, we were required to enroll in courses that we severely criticized and complained against for being hopelessly irrelevant to our chosen professions such as Speech and Drama, Organic Chemistry, Electronics, Computer Applications, and Advanced Creative Writing. I personally chose not to finish Nursing school, but a great many of my former classmates did proceed to become licensed nurses are now well-paid call-center agents, business managers, copyeditors and so on. Even the Bar examinations for aspiring lawyers in the Philippines requires that all specialized and significant field of Philippine law be studied and not just the field of practice that was intended to be focused on. Philippine society seems to put such a heavy premium on generalists. 2) The prevalence of cheap Internet cafes in the Philippines makes it much easier for the majority of Filipinos who do not own a personal computer to be as literate in information technology as anyone else. Next to China, India and Indonesia, the Philippines does account for the fourth most number of Internet users since 2008, even more than those in the United States and other developed countries. And in a world defined increasingly in digital chips rather than physical bricks, computer literacy as second nature for knowledge workers in both affluent and povertystricken populations does count as an edge. 3) The common usage of English in all the key societal institutions: education, entertainment, government, social media and religion means that the average Filipino can converse capably in the worlds most used and understood language even at an early age. It is worthy to note that this second revolution was not brought about by successive and intensive campaigns by management gurus clamoring for better knowledge workers. It was a natural, even organic, process made possible by just enough factors to get right at the same time. Remarkably, this new boom, this new renaissance of knowledge workers was birthed without an intentionally managerial frame in mind, but came about rather as a by-product of a societys attempts towards the holistic development of its citizens, aided greatly by the flattening of the world through globalization and the flourishing of information technology. But there is one more thing that needs to be said regarding the second wave of knowledge workers, and this has to do with its implications on labor organizations. Coincidentally, one of my major subjects of study in my legal degree is that of Philippine Labor Law. The textbook begins with this rather ominous quote, In the lopsided world of work, the job seeker is much weaker than the job provider. To make things even more serendipitous, it leads up to an article written by Peter Drucker himself on the issue of labor unions. The whole thesis of the

book (and which does not seem inconsistent with Druckers views) is that the imbalance of power between employer and employee must be leveled by law and unionization. This point, however, is still reflective of the industrial age in which the idea of unions was developed, which was the same period as the first revolution of the knowledge worker. Even knowledge workers still had to resort to unionization in order to have security of tenure since they were still vulnerable to being employed and re-employed only at their particular kind of industry. They did not have the skills to be mobile enough to explore more options in the job market. On the other hand, with the second revolution of the knowledge worker there does not seem to be as great a need for unionized force in order to leverage the imbalance of power between job seeker and job provider. In the new job market, one job provider is as good as the other since the job seekers feel a lot less restrained in their opportunities, with their greater level of adaptability to varying industry options. Just to close with a happy memory, we were asked sometime last year during the 2011 St Gallen Symposium at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland, about what our idea of the office of the future would be. And the answer I remember contributing was that the office of the future was the person himself. Eventually, the technology would make it possible to be able to carry out work wherever we may be in the world at home, at the park, at the coffee shop, etc. and it wouldnt matter for how many employers we did work for, as long as we could give the output that was expected. Looking at the new wave of knowledge workers in the wireless age, this should not be too far ahead in the future.