A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

Peter Drucker and the Tragedy of the Attention
Commons
As a child in Austria during the first decades of the twentieth
century, Peter Drucker was exposed to some of the foremost
economic thinkers of the age, including notables like Joseph
Schumpeter of “creative destruction” fame, who attended evening
salons held by Drucker’s parents, Adolph and Caroline.
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 The
intellectual energy of these salons laid the foundation for Drucker’s
eventual emergence as one of the most important business thinkers
of the modern period; he is widely acknowledged as the “founder of
modern management.”
30
 His career produced thirty-nine books and
countless articles before his death in 2005 at the age of ninety-five.
Drucker’s sprint toward significance first picked up speed in
1942, when, as a thirty-three-year-old professor at Bennington
College, he published his second book, The Future of Industrial
Man. It asked how an “industrial society”—one unfolding within “the
entirely new physical reality Western man has built up as his habitat
since James Watt invented the steam engine”
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—might best be
structured to respect human freedom and dignity. Arriving in the
midst of an industrial world war, the book found a wide readership.
It impressed the management team at General Motors, who invited
Drucker to spend two years studying how the world’s largest
corporation operated.
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 The 1946 title that resulted from this
engagement, Concept of the Corporation, was one of the first books
to look seriously at how big organizations actually operated. It laid
the foundation for management as something that could be studied,
and it made Drucker’s career.

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For our purposes, Drucker is more than just a famous business
theorist. His influence also helps answer a pressing question that
likely snagged your attention as you read this chapter: Even if we
accept that the hyperactive hive mind arose largely of its own accord,
why did we let it stick around once its flaws became obvious?
—
During his time at GM in the 1940s, Peter Drucker got to know its
larger-than-life CEO, Alfred P. Sloan Jr. As Drucker later recalled,
Sloan once said the following about being a successful manager: “He
must be absolutely tolerant and pay no attention to how a man does
his work.”
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 This idea re-emerged in Drucker’s thinking in the 1950s
and 1960s, a period in which he coined the term knowledge work as
he began to grapple with an emerging economy where the output of
brains was beginning to prove more valuable than the output of
factories.
“The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in
detail,” Drucker wrote in his 1967 book, The Effective Executive. “He
must direct himself.”
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 This was a radical idea. In the nation’s
factories, centralized control of workers was the standard. Influenced
by the so-called “scientific management” principles popularized by
Frederick Winslow Taylor, who would famously prowl the factory
floor with a stopwatch, rooting out inefficient movements, industrial
management saw workers as automatons executing optimized
processes carefully designed by a small cadre of wise managers.
Drucker argued this approach was doomed to fail in the new
world of knowledge work, where productive output was created not
by expensive equipment stamping out parts, but instead by cerebral
workers applying specialized cognitive skills. Indeed, knowledge
workers often knew more about their specialties than those who
managed them. The best way to deploy these highly skilled
individuals, Drucker concluded, was to give them clear objectives
and then leave them alone to accomplish their brainy work however
they saw fit. While it might have been efficient to tell an assembly
line worker exactly how to install a steering wheel, it was futile to try
to tell a marketing copywriter exactly how to brainstorm a new
product slogan.
Drucker preached this idea of knowledge worker autonomy
throughout his long career. As late as 1999, he still emphasized its

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importance:
[Knowledge work] demands that we impose the
responsibility for their productivity on the individual
knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to
manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.
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It’s hard to overestimate the influence of this idea. With the
exception of some routinized bureaucratic processes, like filing
expense reports, the intricacies of how the myriad demanding tasks
that define modern office work are accomplished remain largely
beyond the scope of management. They’re pushed instead into the
hazy realm of personal productivity. Want to know how to get things
done? Buy a book on how to better organize your tasks (Drucker
himself wrote one of the first such books, The Effective Executive), or
use a new planner, or, as is more commonly suggested in our culture
of “crushing it,” simply work harder. Knowledge workers don’t
expect their organization to take an interest in how much work falls
on their plate, or how they get it done.
In our shift from industrial to knowledge work, in other words,
we gave up automaton status for a burdensome autonomy. It’s in this
context that the hyperactive hive mind, once in place, became
devilishly difficult to eradicate, as it’s hard to fix a broken workflow
when it’s no one’s job to make sure the workflow functions. In 1833,
the British economist William Forster Lloyd proposed a hypothetical
scenario, now a classical example in game theory, that can help us
better understand this dynamic. The scenario, which eventually
became known as the tragedy of the commons,
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considers a town
that maintains common grazing land for cattle and sheep, as was
typical in Great Britain in the nineteenth century. Lloyd pointed out
an interesting tension: it’s in the individual interest of each herder to
graze his animals as much as possible on the commons, and yet when
all herders act in their best interest, they’ll inevitably overgraze the
commons, rendering it useless to everyone. Similar scenarios of
individual interest leading to collective hardship turn out to be
common in many different settings—from unstable ecologies, to
resource mining, to the behaviors surrounding shared refrigerators.
Using the mathematical tools introduced in the mid-twentieth

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century by John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind fame), you can even
precisely analyze this situation, which turns out to be a nice example
of what game theorists would call an “inefficient Nash equilibrium.”
This economic trivia informs our discussions here because when
the hyperactive hive mind emerged due to the drivers summarized
earlier in this chapter, communication in the modern office became
yet another example of Lloyd’s thought experiment in action. Once
your organization has fallen into the hive mind, it’s in each
individual’s immediate interest to stick with this workflow, even if it
leads to a bad long-term outcome for the organization as a whole. It
makes your life strictly easier in the moment if you can expect quick
responses to messages that you shoot off to colleagues. Similarly, if
you unilaterally decrease the time you spend checking your inbox in
a group that depends on the hive mind, you’ll slow down other
people’s efforts, generating annoyance and dissatisfaction that might
put your job in jeopardy. At the risk of stretching this analogy
beyond comfort, in knowledge work, we’re overgrazing our common
collection of time and attention because none of us wants to be the
one who lets their cognitive sheep go hungry.
The negative consequences of the hyperactive hive mind, in other
words, are unlikely to be resolved by small shifts in individual habits.
Even good-natured attempts to nudge the behavior of an entire
organization, such as promulgating better norms around email
responsiveness or attempting one-off experiments like email-free
Fridays, are doomed to fail. As 150 years of economic theory has
taught us, to solve the tragedy of the commons, you cannot expect
substantially better behavior from the herders; you need instead to
replace the free-for-all grazing system with something more efficient.
The same holds for the hyperactive hive mind: we cannot tame it
with minor hacks—we need to replace it with a better workflow. And
to do so, we must soften Peter Drucker’s stigma against engineering
office work. Drucker was right to point out that we cannot fully
systematize the specialized efforts of knowledge workers, but we
shouldn’t apply this to the workflows that surround these efforts. A
manager can’t tell a copywriter how to come up with a brilliant ad,
but she can have something to say about how these commissions are
assigned, or about what other obligations are allowed onto the
copywriter’s plate, or about how client requests are handled.

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This goal of putting into place smarter workflows that sidestep
the worst impacts of the hyperactive hive mind is of course a
substantial endeavor—one that will require trial and error and many
annoyances. But with the right guiding principles it’s absolutely
possible, and the competitive advantage it will generate is potentially
massive. The second part of this book, at which we have now arrived,
is dedicated to explaining these principles.

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