Give The Client What They Want? Not So Fast

Jim McGee, labeled by Buzz Bruggeman as "the smartest guy in America about Knowledge Management," not to mention a fellow Princetonian who I hope to see at Reunions at the end of this week, has a pithy new article up at the ESJ site reminding us that what knowledge workers do is a craft, not a production process.  The goal of production is to create more [Camry's, ThinkPad's, QuarterPounders] just the same as the last one, and as closely mirroring the client's expectations as possible.

The goal of knowledge work is to deliver to your client something that could only have been created by you.  But, as Jim points out, that may well deviate from what the client initially asked for or had in mind.  By analogy to Renaissance artists educating their patrons about the nature of art and music and not blindly diving into executing a commission, Jim points the way to producing a unique work product whose form is determined not exactly through negotiation but neither through full-bore collaboration.

And speaking of the Buzz/Jim connection, how's this for a distillation of what makes the blogosphere so powerful:

"Bruggeman cites Mostly McGee author Jim McGee with one of the ideas that explains blogging’s power: Bloggers, according to McGee, are the intelligent agents that tech tried and failed to produce with software that was supposed to go and fetch useful information for users. Except bloggers are human and they run around the Internet finding all sorts of stuff and share it interactively with whoever chooses to look for it."