A social ecologist
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 and old and 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.”
The discipline of management
If you can’t replicate something because you don’t understand it, then it really hasn’t been invented; it’s only been done.
When I published The Practice of Management, fifty years ago, that book made it possible for people to learn how to manage, something that up until then only a few geniuses seemed to be able to do, and nobody could replicate it.
When I came into management, a lot of it had come out of the field of engineering. And a lot of it had come out of accounting. And some of it came out of psychology. And some more came out of labor relations. Each of those fields was considered separate, and each of them, by itself, was ineffectual. You can’t do carpentry, you know, if you have only a saw, or only a hammer, or if you have never heard of a pair of pliers. It’s when you put all of those tools into one kit that you invent. That’s what I did in large part in The Practice of Management. I made a discipline of it.
Face reality
Exploit the new realities.
Today’s new realities fit neither the assumption of the Left not those of the Right. They don’t mesh at all with “what everybody know.” They differ even more from what everybody, regardless of political persuasion, still believes reality to be. “What is” differs totally from what both the Right and the Left believe “ought to be.” The greatest and most dangerous turbulence today results from the collision between the delusions of the decision makers – whether in governments, in the top managements of businesses, or in union leadership – and the realities.
But a time of turbulence is also one of great opportunity for those who can understand, accept, and exploit the new realities. One constant theme is, therefore, the need for the decision maker in the individual enterprise to face up to reality and resist the temptation of what “everybody knows,” the temptations of the certainties of yesterday, which are about to become the deleterious superstitions of tomorrow. To manage in turbulent times, therefore, means to face up to the new realities. It means starting with the question: “What is the world really like?” rather than with the assertions and assumptions that made sense only a few years ago.
The management revolution
What matters is the productivity of non manual worker.
In 1881, an American, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915), first applied knowledge to the study of work, the analysis of work, and the engineering of work. This led to the productivity revolution. The Productivity Revolution has become a victim of its own success. From now on, what matters is the productivity of non manual workers. And that requires applying knowledge to knowledge.
But knowledge is now also being applies systematically and purposefully to define what new knowledge is needed whether it is feasible, and what has to be done to make knowledge effective. It is being applied, in other words, to systematic innovation. This third change in the dynamics of knowledge can be called the Management Revolution. Supplying knowledge to find out how existing knowledge can best be applied to produce results is, in effect, what we mean by management.
Knowledge and technology
The new technology embraces and feeds off the entire array of human knowledge’s.
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.
Shrinking of the younger population
The next society will be with us shortly.
In the developed countries, the dominate factor in the 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.