An engineering manager who I worked with 25 years ago challenged me one day. “You know, Bruce, if all employees were engineers, you wouldn’t need mistake-proofing,” he said. At the time, I was too stunned by his comment to even respond. But happily, the memory provides good fodder for another column.

There persists a notion today in some quarters that people with college degrees, in particular technical degrees, have cornered the market on smarts—and value. When, in 1959, Peter Drucker predicted the rise of “knowledge work” and the concurrent demise of manual work, I think he might have inadvertently led U.S. manufacturing down a knowledge-worker rathole, one where manual work, or in fact any kind of work involving production, became burdensome to our great culture. Peter Drucker's prophecy may have been self-fulfilling, as American manufacturers raced to find ways to replace manual labor with automation.

During the 1990s for example, General Motors spent $90 billion (yes, billion) on robots, conveyors, and computers in a failed attempt to supplant manual work. I wonder how they calculated the ROI.

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