Fast Company  The People Are the Company  How to build your
company around your people.  Revolutions start in the most
unexpected places and with the most unlikely heroes. Who would
imagine that the conventional wisdom of the Industrial Age would
be challenged by copier repair technicians -- "tech reps" -- at
Xerox? Or that field research by anthropologists would support a
new set of management principles for competing in the Knowledge
Era?    Think how a garden-variety reengineer would interpret
this finding: Here's "low-hanging fruit" -- easy pickings for
immediate productivity gains. Simply reroute the tech reps, cut
out the conversation, eliminate the dead time -- and pocket the
savings.   These technicians were knowledge workers in the
truest sense. And it was through conversations at the warehouse
-- conversations that weren't a step in any formal "business
process" or a box in any official "org chart" -- that knowledge
transfer happened.      Across the Knowledge Divide  The tech
rep experiments offer