The task of management is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant. This is what organization is all about, and it is the reason that management is the critical, determining factor.
Management must be built on communications and on individual responsibility. All members need to think through what they aim to accomplish—and make sure their associates know and understand that aim. All have to think through what they owe to others—and make sure that others understand. All have to think through what they, in turn, need from others—and make sure others know what is expected of them.
Management must enable the enterprise and each of its members to grow and to develop as needs and opportunities change.
Only a society in dynamic disequilibrium has stability and cohesion.
Society, community, and family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability and to prevent, or at least to slow, change. And yet we also know that theories, values, and all the artifacts of human minds do age and rigidify, becoming obsolete, becoming afflictions.
Yet “revolutions” every generation, as was recommended by Thomas Jefferson, are not the solution. We know that “revolution” is not achievement and the new dawn. It results from senile decay, from the bankruptcy of ideas and institutions, from a failure of self-renewal. The only way in which an institution—whether a government, a university, a business, a labor union, an army—can maintain continuity is by building systematic, organized innovation into its very structure. Institutions, systems, policies, eventually outlive themselves, as do products, processes, and services. They do it when they accomplish their objectives, and they do it when they fail to accomplish their objectives. Innovation and entrepreneurship are thus needed in society as much as in the economy, in public service institutions as much as in business. The modern organization must be a destabilizer; it must be organized for innovation.
In its culture, the organization always transcends the community.
Modern organizations have to operate in a community. Their results are in the community. Yet the organization cannot submerge itself in the community or subordinate itself to that community. Its “culture” has to transcend community. Companies on which local communities depend for employment close their factories or replace grizzled model-makers who have spent years learning their craft with twenty-five-year-old “whiz kids” who know computer simulation. Every one of such changes upsets the community. Every one is perceived as “unfair.” Every one destabilizes.
It is the nature of the task that determines the culture of an organization, rather than the community in which that task is being performed. Each organization’s value system is determined by its task. Every hospital, every school, every business, has to believe that what it is doing is an essential contribution on which all the others in the community depend in the last analysis. To perform its task successfully, it has to be organized and managed the same way. If an organization’s culture clashes with the values of its community, the organization’s culture will prevail—or else the organization will not be able to make its social contribution.
Precisely because change is a constant, the foundations have to be extra strong.
The more an institution is organized to be a change leader, the more it will need to establish continuity internally and externally, the more it will need to balance rapid change and continuity. One way is to make partnership in change the basis of continuing relationships. Balancing change and continuity requires continuous work on information. Nothing disrupts continuity and corrupts relationships more than poor or unreliable information. It has to become routine for any enterprise to ask at any change, even the most minor one: “Who needs to be informed of this?” And this will become more and more important as more enterprises come to rely on people working together without actually working together—that is, on people using the new technologies of information. Above all, there is need for continuity in respect to the fundamentals of the enterprise: its mission, its values, its definition of performance and results.
Finally, the balance between change and continuity has to be built into compensation, recognition, and rewards. We will have to learn, similarly, that an organization will have to reward continuity—for instance, by considering people who deliver continuing improvement to be as valuable to the organization, and as deserving of recognition and reward, as the genuine innovator.
The educated person needs to bring knowledge to bear on the present, not to mention molding the future.
In his 1943 novel, published in English as Magister Ludi (1949), Hermann Hesse anticipated the sort of world the humanists want—and its failure. The book depicts a brotherhood of intellectuals, artists, and humanists who live a life of splendid isolation, dedicated to the Great Tradition, its wisdom and its beauty. But the hero, the most accomplished Master of the Brotherhood, decides in the end to return to the polluted, vulgar, turbulent, strife-torn, moneygrubbing reality—for his values are only fool’s gold unless they have relevance to the world.
Postcapitalist society needs the educated person even more than any earlier society did, and access to the great heritage of the past will have to be an essential element. But liberal education must enable the person to understand reality and master it.
Successful transnational companies see themselves as separate, nonnational entities.
Most companies doing international business today are still organized as traditional multinationals. But the transformation into transnational companies has begun, and it is moving fast. The products or services may be the same, but the structure is fundamentally different. In a transnational company there is only one economic unit, the world. Selling, servicing, public relations, and legal affairs are local. But parts, machines, planning, research, finance, marketing, pricing, and management are conducted in contemplation of the world market. One of America’s leading engineering companies, for instance, makes one critical part for all its forty-three plants worldwide in one location outside of Antwerp, Belgium—and nothing else. It has organized product development for the entire world in three places and quality control in four. For this company, national boundaries have largely become irrelevant.
The transnational company is not totally beyond the control of national governments. It must adapt to them. But these adaptations are exceptions to policies and practices decided on for your worldwide markets and technologies. Successful transnational companies see themselves as separate, nonnational entities. This self-perception is evidenced by something unthinkable a few decades ago: a transnational top management.
In the developed countries, the dominant factor in the next society will be something to which most people are only just beginning to pay attention: the rapid growth of the older population and the rapid shrinking of the younger generation. The shrinking of the younger population will cause an even greater upheaval than the growing number of older people, if only because nothing like this has happened since the dying centuries of the Roman Empire. In every single developed country, but also in China and Brazil, the birth rate is now well below the replacement rate of 2.2 live births per woman of reproductive age. Politically, this means that immigration will become an important—and highly divisive—issue in all rich countries. It will cut across all traditional political alignments.
Economically, the decline in the younger population will change markets in fundamental ways. Growth in family formation has been the driving force of all domestic markets in the developed world, but the rate of family formation is certain to fall steadily unless bolstered by large-scale immigration of younger people.
The new technology embraces and feeds off the entire array of human knowledges.
The search for knowledge, as well as the teaching thereof, has traditionally been dissociated from application. Both have been organized by subject, that is, according to what appeared to be the logic of knowledge itself. The faculties and departments of the university, its degrees, its specializations, indeed the entire organization of higher learning, have been subject-focused. They have been, to use the language of the experts on organization, based upon “product,” rather than on “market” or “end use.” Now we are increasingly organizing knowledge and the search for it around areas of application rather than around the subject areas of disciplines. Interdisciplinary work has grown everywhere.
This is a symptom of the shift in the meaning of knowledge from an end in itself to a resource, that is, a means to some result. Knowledge as the central energy of a modern society exists altogether in application and when it is put to work. Work, however, cannot be defined in terms of the disciplines. End results are interdisciplinary of necessity.
