Through some miracle of clairvoyant intellect, their most profitable and productive when left this same man, at 80 years old, took a long look to do whatever they wanted, and that the best at the (pre-internet browser!) digital network CEOs of the future would quickly learn to accept and predicted that it would shatter capitalism this reality. altogether. Writing in 1992-1993, Peter Drucker said that the wage worker would soon be Unlike wage workers, knowledge workers replaced by the knowledge worker, and that the wouldn’t need to be managed* . “So how would trouble with these new knowledge workers would company hierarchies work?”, HBR asked Drucker, prove impossible for CEOs to manage or value. representing the question in all of its readers’ These workers wouldn’t need to all show up at heads. Well, Mr. Drucker replied, They wouldn’t. the factory at 9am. These knowledge workers The company hierarchy is dead. Mr. Drucker wrote would be decentralized. The best of them would a whole book about this whole theory, ultimately be unmanageable. In a lengthy 1992 interview with positing, that certain knowledge workers’ hours The Harvard Business Review, Drucker explained might become so valuable, they’d be worth 10,000 that the best of these women and men would be wage workers’ hours. 40