ABSTRACT
The productivity of the newly dominant groups in the work force, knowledge workers and service workers, will be the biggest and toughest challenge facing managers in the developed countries for decades to come. Rising productivity was something so totally unprecedented that there was no term for it in any language. The productivity explosion was arguably the most important social event of the past hundred years, and one that had no precedent in history. Productivity in making and moving things is going up at the same annual rate. In making and moving things people do one task at a time. There is more to increasing productivity in knowledge work and service work than defining the task, concentrating on the task, and defining performance. When Frederick Taylor started his work on the productivity of making and moving things in the early 1880s, class war between industrial proletarian and 'bourgeois', its reality but even more the fear of it, obsessed every developed country.
