Steve Jobs may have had an enormous ego as the head of Apple, but he understood his place in the information age when he famously quipped,

Genius and profound. Your best move is to intentionally not be the smartest person in the room. And other iconic figures would agree. As Lee Iacocca once said, "I hire people brighter than me and get out of their way."

While smart people may be found up and down your organizational chart, there's a more specific term for the type of people Jobs and Iacocca were referencing: knowledge workers. 

Coined by management expert Peter Drucker in 1959, the term knowledge workers refers to people whose main capital is to think for a living. They work with their heads, not their hands, to plan, analyze, organize, test, program, distribute, search, market, or otherwise generally contribute to the transformation of information in the knowledge economy.

Drucker asserted quite prophetically before his death in 2005 that increasing the productivity of knowledge workers was the most important contribution managers needed to make in the 21st century.

That leads to the million-dollar question: How do you manage them? How do you manage highly paid, independent thinkers who like to control the process of their own work and don't like to be managed, and who own their organization's means of innovating, developing, and producing?