• For many employees today, collaborative, complex problem solving is the essence of their work. These "tacit" activities-involving the exchange of information, the making of judgments, and a need to draw on multifaceted forms of knowledge in exchanges with coworkers, customers, and suppliers-are increasingly a part of the standard model for companies in the developed world.

• Employees like managers and salespeople, whose jobs consist primarily of such activities, now make up 25 to 50 percent of the workforce. In insurance companies, tacit interactions now constitute the primary activities of 63 percent of the workforce. The proportion is 60 percent in securities companies, 70 percent in health care, and 45 percent in retailing. Even in utilities, 30 percent of the employees undertake tacit work.

• Companies have traditionally boosted their productivity by improving the efficiency of transformational activities (like the extraction of raw materials) or of transactions (for instance, the work of the clerks in the accounts-payable function). But, the old strategies for
efficiency improvements don't apply to employees whose jobs mostly involve tacit interactions; instead, a company must boost these workers' productivity by making them more effective at what they do.

• To achieve that goal, companies must alter the way they craft strategies, design organizations, manage talent, and leverage technology.

• Companies will increasingly need to deploy technology that makes shared data, information, and expertise available in real time; to offer decision support tools that help workers involved in tacit interactions create insights from data and analyses and that enhance the context and information that interactions require; to improve the ability of employees, customers, and suppliers to interact; and to offer effective collaboration tools for multiparty work flows.

• Many of the technologies and tools that tacit workers are going to use will promote the collaborative and dynamic pursuit, capture, and sharing of knowledge and will allow for more video, audio, and graphics to facilitate remote interactions and broader access to scarce expertise. Tools based on search capacities, collaborative approaches to capturing and organizing knowledge, and new digital-learning channels are likely to emerge.

• Executives will have to focus on deploying work-group-centric tools that are easy to set up and tear down as projects and strategic experiments come and go. They will also have to find ways of connecting these tools easily to preexisting interaction platforms. In addition, the issue of information overload must be addressed: already, Microsoft and others are trying to help tacit workers filter data from interactions more successfully and thereby reduce the burden of the excess information created when companies manage interactions (and their rate of increase) improperly.

• Managing in an environment where most workers mainly participate in interactions will upend the greater part of what senior management has learned over the past half century. But the opportunity to create new forms of competitive advantage is clear for companies that take a new approach. The time to start is now.