How To Making Work ProductiveWe speak of unskilled work, skilled work, and knowledge work but this is misleading. It is not the work that is unskilled, skilled, or knowledgeable, it is the worker. Skill and knowledge are aspects of working .The work itself is the same whether it requires no skill or high skill, a lot of knowledge or very little.For almosTo make a pair of shoes one used to have to be“ highly skilled.century now, we have been able to make shoes practically without skill. It would be no great trick to automate shoemaking fully so that it requires no manual work. Yet the shoe itself has hardly changed. Nor has the process.It requires the same steps, from preparing leather, to cutting, forming, stitching, and gluing. The steps are being carried out in the same sequence, to the same requirements and standards, and result in the same finished product. The work of shoemaking remains the same, even though tools and skill requirements have changed drastically. Only an expert could tell whether a shoe had been made entirely by hand and with great craft skill or in an entirely automated process.This may seem to be quibbling. Yet the realization that work is general and generic and that skill and knowledge are in the working rather than in the work is the key to making work productive. The generic nature of work-certainly as far as manual or any other production work is concerned-implies that work can be worked on systematically, if not scientifically.The first step toward making the achieving is to make work productive. The more we understand what the work itself demands, the more can we then integrate the work into the human activity we call working. The more we understand work itself, the more freedom we can give the worker. There is no contradiction between scientific management, that is, the rational and impersonal approach to work, and the achieving worker. The two complement each other, though they are quite different.Whatever study of work has been done so far has confined itself to manual work-for the simple reason that, until quite recently, this was the main work around. In describing what is known about making work productive, this book, therefore, ofnecessity, focuses on manual work. But the same principles and approaches also apply to any other production work, e.g., to most service work. They apply to the processing of information, that is, to most clerical work. They even apply to most knowledge work. Only the applications and the tools vary. Precisely because work is general and generic, there is essentially no difference among work the end product of which is a thing, work the end product of which is information, and work the end product of which is knowledge.Making work productive requires four separateactivities, each having its own characteristics and demands.First, it requires analysis. We have to know the specific operations needed for work, their sequence, and their requirements.Second, we also need synthesis. The individual operations have to be brought together into a process of production.Third, we need to build into the process the control of direction, of quality and quantity, of standards, and of exceptions.Fourth, the appropriate tools have to be provided.One more basic pint needs to be made. Because work is objective and impersonal and a “ something-e”ven if it is intangible, like information or knowledge-making work productive has to start out with the end product, the output of work. It cannot start with the input, whether craft skill or formal knowledge. Skills, information, knowledge, are tools; and what wool is to be applied when, and for what purpose, must always be determined by the desired end product. The end product determines what work is needed. It also determines the synthesis into a process, the design of the appropriate controls, and the specifications for the tools needed.Work is a process, and any process need to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work. Specifically the process of production needs built-in controls in respect to: its direction; its quality; its quantity it turns out in a given unit of time and with a given input of working; its standards, such as machine maintenance or safety; and its economy, that is, the efficiency with which it uses resourcesEach work process needs its own controls. There is no“ standard ” control, but acontrol systems have to satisfy the same basic demands and have to live up to same overall specifications.The first thing to know is that controlling the work process means control of the work, and not control of worker. Control is a tool of the worker and must never be his master. It must also never become an impediment to working. The most extreme cases of controls impeding work are not to be found in manufacturing but in retailing and in the hospital. There controls have been permitted to become an end