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Friday Report

HOW TO PREPARE FOR THE SECOND HALF OF YOUR LIFE AS A KNOWLEDGE WORKER

All readers of this newsletter and many others in society are “knowledge workers,” a term coined by Peter Drucker years ago. They add value and create wealth by employing their mental skills instead their manual skills. In his new book, “The Essential Drucker,” Dr. Drucker describes how this will effect the future: “…they will be the largest single group in the population and the workforce…Knowledge workers will be the group that gives the emerging knowledge society its character, its leadership, its social profile. They may not be the ruling class of the knowledge society, but they are already its leading class.

“For the first time in human history, individuals can expect to outlive organizations. This creates a totally new challenge: What to do with the second half of one’s life? .. One can no longer expect that the organization for which one works at age thirty will still be around when one reaches age sixty…But knowledge workers are not ‘finished.’ They are perfectly capable of functioning despite all kinds of minor complaints. And yet the original work that was so challenging when the knowledge worker was thirty has become a deadly bore when the knowledge worker is fifty – and still he or she is likely to face another fifteen if not another twenty years of work…

“To manage oneself, therefore, will increasingly require preparing oneself for the second half of one’s life.

“…While we cannot yet say what the future will be like, we can with very high probability discern its main and most important features, and some of its main and most important challenges…The first thing to say will be that – again contrary to what most everybody believes – it will not be a future of expanding free markets as we have understood free markets, that is, as markets for the exchange of goods and services…’Free market’ tomorrow means flow of information rather than trade…

“And finally, we can say with near-certainty, the challenges we will face in the next economy are management challenges that will have to be tackled by individuals…Government will not become less pervasive, less powerful, let alone less expensive. It will, however, increasingly depend for its effectiveness on what managers and professionals are doing in and with their own nongovernmental organization, and in and with their own lives.”

When we considered this task, we immediately thought of the Internet as being the source of all the information we would ever need. To test this idea, Jim Vardaman spent 18+ hours last week searching the net with Google, now the biggest search engine with two-plus billion web pages. Try it. You will find that surfing Google is like reading the dictionary. The subject changes back and forth constantly. A big organization or subject will be listed under dozens or hundreds of categories. Until you become proficient in entering the proper search words, finding the few items that will help you is hard. Transferring them to something accessible without logging on Google again is difficult.

Most knowledge workers who receive our Friday Report have another problem: their e-mail addresses are temporary. When IPCO bought Champion, Plum Creek acquired The Timber Company, and Weyerhaeuser acquires Willamette, addresses of everyone in the acquired company change. Changes also occur whenever you change jobs. Furthermore, Excite no longer exists as a search engine, and the number of ISP’s no longer operating is huge. It is thus difficult to stay in touch with selected sources of information. Finally, many employers object to personal e-mail correspondence even if it eventually leads to increases in valuable knowledge.

www.vardaman.com and www.se-timbersales.com contain much valuable knowledge for some workers. We intend to maintain its accessibility, but Vardaman is in his 81^st year. Drucker is still contributing at 92, but no one lives forever.

Therefore, as a first step to prepare for the second half of your life as knowledge worker, we urge you to register your domain name. Two outfits should give you good service: http://www.dotster.com and http://www.domaininvestigator.com They charge $15 for one year and $25 for two years and do not sell your personal information to marketers. To find a host, click on http://builder.cnet.com/webbuilding/pages/Servers/Webhosting or http://www.hostindex.com We have had good hosting service at http://jtlnet.com Their prices start at $7.50 per month for three e-mail accounts, a place to host a web site, and if you wish, 10 megs of disk storage, etc.

Once you complete this process, don’t post your e-mail address publicly if spam irritates you. We get 10-12/day, but they are easy to spot and trash with one click of the “delete” key. Creating your personal web site is cheap and fun. Before you do, however, study, study, study Web Pages That Suck by Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis, a big paperback sold in most bookstores.

This is how to create, a low-cost, permanent, private library of knowledge to match your requirements. You can select and store in it anything likely to help you follow Drucker’s advice. You will soon have what you need to prepare yourself for the second half of your life. All of us will be winners if you succeed.