For me the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization.
I consider myself a “social ecologist,” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment. The term “social ecology” is my own coinage. But the discipline itself boasts an old distinguished lineage. Its greatest document is Alexis de Tocqueville‘s Democracy in America. But no one is as close to me in temperament, concepts, and approach as the mid-Victorian Englishman Walter Bagehot. Living (as I have) in an age of great social change, Bagehot first saw the emergence of new institutions: civil service and cabinet government, as cores of a functioning democracy, and banking as the center of a functioning economy.
A hundred years after Bagehot, I was first to identify management as the new social institution of the emerging society of organizations and, a little later, to spot the emergence of knowledge as the new central resource, and knowledge workers as the new ruling class of a society that is not only “postindustrial” but postsocialist and, increasingly, postcapitalist. As it had been for Bagehot, for me too the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization. Thus, I know what Bagehot meant when he said that he saw himself sometimes as a liberal Conservative and sometimes as a conservative Liberal but never as a “conservative Conservative” or a “liberal Liberal.”
Knowledge people must take responsibility for their own development and placement.
In today’s society and organizations, people work increasingly with knowledge, rather than with skill. Knowledge and skill differ in a fundamental characteristic—skill change very, very slowly. Knowledge, however, changes itself. It makes itself obsolete, and very rapidly. A knowledge worker becomes obsolescent if he or she does not go back to school every three or four years.
This not only means that the equipment of learning, of knowledge, of skill, of experience that one acquires early is not sufficient for our present life time and working time. People change over such a long time span. They become different persons with different needs, different abilities, different perspectives, and, therefore, with a need to “reinvent themselves.” I quite intentionally use a stronger word than “revitalize.” If you talk of fifty years of working life—and this, I think, is going to be increasingly the norm—you have to reinvent yourself. You have to make something different out of yourself, rather than just find a new supply of energy.
To know one’s strengths, to know how to improve them, and to know what one cannot do — are the keys to continuous learning.
Whenever a Jesuit priest or a Calvinist pastor does anything of significance (for instance, making a key decision), he is expected to write down what results he anticipates. Nine months later, he then feeds back from the actual results to these anticipations. This very soon shows him what he did well and what his strengths are. It also shows him what he has to learn and what habits he has to change. Finally it shows him what he is not gifted for and cannot do well. I have followed this method myself, now for fifty years. It brings out what one’s strengths are —and this is the most important thing an individual can know about himself or herself. It brings out where improvement is needed and what kind of improvement is needed. Finally, it brings out what an individual cannot do and therefore should not even try to do. To know one’s strengths, to know how to improve them, and to know what one cannot do—they are the keys to continuous learning.
In a moral society the public good must always rest on private virtue.
To make what is good for the country good for the enterprise requires hard work, great management skill, high standards of responsibility, and broad vision. It is a counsel of perfection. To carry it out completely would require the philosopher’s stone that can translate the basest element into pure gold. But, if management is to remain a leading group, it must make this rule the lodestar of its conduct, must consciously strive to live up to it, and must actually do so with a fair degree of success. For in a good, a moral, a lasting society, the public good must always rest on private virtue. Every leading group must be able to claim that the public good determines its own interest. This assertion is the only legitimate basis for leadership; to make it a reality is the first duty of the leaders.
Keynes was interested in the behavior of commodities, while I was interested in the behavior of people.
I do not accept the basic premise on which economics as a discipline is based and without which it cannot be sustained. I do not accept that the economic sphere is an independent sphere, let alone that it is the dominant one. It is surely an important sphere. And as Bertolt Brecht said, “first comes the belly and then morality”—and filling the belly is what economics is all about in the main. I not only am willing but insist that in all political and social decisions the economic costs are calculated and taken into account. To talk only of “benefit,” I consider irresponsible and bound to lead to disaster. And I believe in free markets, having seen far too much of the alternative.
But still, for me the economic sphere is one sphere rather than the sphere. Economic considerations are restraints rather than overriding determinants. Economic wants and economic satisfactions are important but not absolutes. Above all, economic activities, economic institutions, economic rationality, are means to noneconomic (that is, human or social) ends rather than ends in themselves. And this means that I do not see economics as an autonomous “science.” In short, it means that I am not an economist—something I have known since, in 1934 as a young economist in a London merchant bank, I sat in the John Maynard Keynes seminar in Cambridge. I suddenly realized that Keynes was interested in the behavior of commodities, while I was interested in the behavior of people.
Today’s profitable business will become tomorrow’s white elephant.
Joseph Schumpeter insisted that innovation is the very essence of economics and most certainly of a modern economy. Schumpeter’s Theory of Economic Development makes profit fulfill an economic function. In the economy of change and innovation, a profit, in contrast to Karl Marx‘s theory, is not a “surplus value” stolen from the workers. On the contrary, it is the only source of jobs for workers and of labor income. The theory of economic development shows that no one except the innovator makes a genuine “profit”; and the innovator’s profit is always quite short-lived.
But innovation, in Schumpeter’s famous phrase, is also “creative destruction.” It makes obsolete yesterday’s capital equipment and capital investment. The more an economy progresses, the more capital formation will it therefore need. Thus, what the classical economist—or the accountant or the stock exchange—considers “profit” is a genuine cost, the cost of staying in business, the cost of a future in which nothing is predictable except that today’s profitable business will become tomorrow’s white elephant.
Every organized society is built upon a concept of the nature of man and of his function and place in society.
Whatever its truth as a picture of human nature, this concept always gives a true picture of the nature of the society, which recognizes and identifies itself with it. It symbolizes the fundamental tenets and beliefs of society by showing the sphere of human activity, which it regards as socially decisive and supreme. The concept of man as “economic animal” is the true symbol of societies of bourgeois capitalism and of Marxist socialism, which see in the free exercise of man’s economic activity the means toward the realization of their aims. Economic satisfactions alone appear socially important and relevant. Economic positions, economic privileges, and economic rights are those for which man works.
Society is only meaningful if its purpose and ideals make sense in terms of the individual’s purpose and ideals.
For the individual there is no society unless he has social status and function. There must be a definite functional relationship between individual life and group life. For the individual without function and status, society is irrational, incalculable, and shapeless. The “rootless” individual, the outcast—fr absence of social function and status casts a man from the society of his fellows—see no society. He sees only demoniac forces, half sensible, half meaningless, half in light and half in darkness, but never predictable. They decide about his life and his livelihood without the possibility of interference on his part, indeed without the possibility of his understanding them. He is like a blindfolded man in a strange room playing a game of which he does not know the rules.
