Data, Information and Knowledge

Speech by Rick Wartzman

...Peter’s writing often label him a “business guru”—a tag that he detested and that, frankly, fails to do him justice in terms of the breadth of his thinking.

...Among their friends, whom Peter first met when he was eight years old, was Sigmund Freud...

...Peter saw himself not so much as a management expert but, rather, as what he called a “social ecologist”—a close observer of the way human beings are organized across all sectors: in business but also in government and in the nonprofit arena.

...he attended classes taught by Joseph Schumpeter, whose theories of “creative destruction” and entrepreneurship had a huge influence on him.

 

...Peter’s assignment was to come in and assess GM’s operations, top to bottom, from the factory floor to the office of the automaker’s legendary chairman, Alfred Sloan.

...He predicted the Hitler-Stalin pact in the late ’30s. He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union long before most foreign policy experts did.Actually, “I don’t predict,” he said. “I just look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen.”

...What is needed to remedy this, according to Peter, is not, as a rule, “more data, more

technology, more speed.” What is needed is to step back and better determine what kind of information is required to perform the tasks at hand. What is needed are changes in

concepts—changes, Peter wrote, that will prove “at least as important as the changes in

technology.”

...bedrock Drucker idea: what he called “management by objectives and self control.” Under this framework, each manager should be held strictly accountable for the results of his performance. But what he does to reach those results, he—and only he (or she)—should control (so long as the means don’t fall outside of what is ethical or considered fundamentally sound).

...When it comes to knowledge and information, Peter asserted, “the producers of the data”—the accountants and IT people—“can’t possibly know what data the users need” so that it becomes genuinely useful information, and not just more noise.

“Only individual knowledge workers . . . can convert data into information. And only

individual knowledge workers . . . can decide how to organize their information so that it

becomes their key to effective action.” Yet all too often, these individuals are not brought in when decisions are made on what information will be produced or how it will be arrayed.

...The secret to effectiveness is to link knowledge from one of these areas to others. “Only

connect,” he liked to quote the great novelist E.M. Forster as saying.

To be clear: Peter wasn’t calling for a new generation of polymaths—“those who are at

home in many knowledges”; as a matter of fact, he forecast, “we will probably become even more specialized. But what we do need—and what will define the educated person in the knowledge society—is the ability to

understand the various knowledges. What is each one about? What is it trying to do? What are its central concerns and theories? What major new insights has it produced?”