The good professor certainly uses the term there, beginning
on page 2. However, that is not his first use of the term and
it is not completely clear that he actually coined it.
So far as I know, Drucker's earliest use of the term "knowledge
worker" occurs in Managing for Results (1964), published two
years before The Effective Executive (1966). He doesn't use
the term there until he introduces it by way of a quote from a
1963 speech by Frederick Kappel, then head of AT&T (see
page 222).
However, Drucker was writing about knowledge work much
earlier than that. In Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959), he refers
to "people doing knowledge work" (see page 122). And, even
earlier, in The New Society (1950), he was writing about the
shift to "intellectual skills" (see page 43).
Drucker has been the chief chronicler of the shift to knowledge
work and certainly its most trenchant analyst. That same shift
has held my interest since 1970, when I read what I consider
Drucker's first full-blown exposition of the nature and implications
of the shift to knowledge work -- The Age of Discontinuity (1969).
Since then I've made it a point to gather those of Drucker's books
that I didn't already possess and to study his chronicling of the
shift to knowledge work. When I was consulting, my practice
centered on the problem Drucker said would be the management
challenge of this century: making knowledge work productive.
Over the years, he and I have exchanged letters regarding the
matter, which is why I am able to so handily rattle off the
comments above.
Regards,
Fred Nickols
Executive Director
Strategic Planning & Management Services
Educational Testing Service
Mail Stop 02-E
Princeton, NJ 08541
(609) 734-5077 Tel
(609) 734-5990 Fax
fnickols@ets.org
nickols@aol.com
*** Any views expressed are mine, not those of Educational Testing Service
***
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