3min chapter

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Chip Conley || Wisdom, Midlife, and Peak Experience

The Psychology Podcast

CHAPTER

The Future of Business Will Be Ruled by Knowledge Workers

I love your blog. And I know it's every now and then you have some guest posts as well. So I'd love to have you write something or we can do a Q&A or whatever. What I know is that the thing that's interesting, Scott, is we don't really have a culture in the work world or otherwise that is vested in the idea of cultivating and harvesting wisdom. Peter Drucker came up with the phrase knowledge worker in 1959. Seven of the 10 most valuable companies in the world today are in fact tech companies.

00:00
Speaker 1
Yeah,
Speaker 2
I love your blog. And I know it's every now and then you have some guest posts as well. You do love to have one from you. That wasn't like my way of I'd be honored, but that wasn't my I was just I hope you know that wasn't my way of. Listen, I love as I told
Speaker 1
you, your scientific American article just like blew me away. It's like Arthur article from the Atlantic from last June blew me away. And so Arthur and I just did a Q&A on ours. So I'd love to have you write something or we can do a Q&A or whatever. What I know is that the thing that's interesting, Scott, is we don't really have a culture in the work world or otherwise that is vested in the idea of cultivating and harvesting wisdom. And what I mean by that, it's not that we don't have a culture of knowledge. In fact, you know, Peter Drucker is the one who came up with the phrase knowledge worker in 1959. He said, the future of business will actually be ruled by knowledge workers. And here we are 61 years later and seven of the 10 most valuable companies in the world today are in fact tech companies. But what I really believe is that we've moved from a time where we need to retire the concept of the knowledge worker because everybody has an iPhone in their pocket. And an increasing percentage of the population is what we might call knowledge workers. But I think when we're washing knowledge, what we really have scarcity for is wisdom. And I think it's time for us to actually think about what would a wisdom worker be? And I know that sounds bizarre, but it's an interesting idea because wisdom literally speaks to a lot of what you've written about in your new book. A lot of it really speaks to this idea of wisdom is about pattern recognition. It's being able to assimilate or cultivate some of the patterns you've seen in your life and then almost develop the intuition such that you can see the future even before it happens. And I don't think that there's necessarily a direct correlation between wisdom and age. I think someone can cultivate their wisdom in a very young age or be 75 years old and have cultivated no wisdom. But what's interesting to me is how do we create a world where the future is partially defined by wisdom workers who are able to also understand emotional intelligence and understand people? Because one of the things that computers, artificial intelligence will get better and better and better at data and knowledge and maybe even providing some insight. But understanding humans, artificial intelligence will get there, but trying to understand creativity or intuition or Google's great at serving up all the answers in the world but not so great at serving up questions. And a wise person like Socrates, they should have a Socratic CEO out there in the world who is the embodiment of catalytic questions. And I think that that will more and more be how we see business in the future.

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