Subject: POWERSHIFT
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Comments:
In 1970 Alvin Toffler introduced the world to FUTURE SHOCK. Now,
with POWERSHIFT, he challenges us to rethink our world. The ideas
are worthwhile, as we try to rethink the Forest Service. I hope that
the enclosed review (4+ pages) will give you a glimpse of Toffler's
vision. Happy New year! Dve..
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POWERSHIFT--Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence
at the Edge of the 21st Century
by
Alvin Toffler
Bantam Books, ISBN 0-553-05776-6
666 Fifth Ave.
New York, NY 10103
November 1990 $22.95
"While headlines today focus on the tremendous shifts of power at the global
level, Toffler says that equally significant, but largely unnoticed, shifts of
power are taking place in the intimate, everyday world we inhabit--the world of
supermarkets and hospitals, banks and business offices, television and
telephones. Power shifts are transforming finance, politics, and the media,
together creating a now radically different society. The very nature of power
is changing.
Because knowledge--including art, science, moral values, information (and
misinformation)--now provides the key raw material for wealth creation, today's
power struggles reach deep into our minds, psyches, and personal lives.
POWERSHIFT maps the 'info-wars' now tearing us apart--power battles that pit
new-style workers against old-line bosses, managers against investors, retailers
against manufacturers, new media against the old television networks, and former
allies, like Japan, the United States, and Europe, against one another." (Cover
leaflet)
Information and Knowledge--Information Wars at the Edge of the Third Wave
"The info-wars cast the corporation--and the work that goes on in it--into
a new light. . . . Forget, for a moment, all conventional job descriptions;
forget ranks; forget departmental functions. Think of the firm, instead, as a
beehive of knowledge processing.
In the day of the smokestack it was assumed that workers knew little of
importance and that relevant information or intelligence could be gathered by
top management or a tiny staff. The proportion of the work force engaged in
knowledge processing was tiny.
Today, by contrast, we are finding that much of what happens inside a firm
is aimed at replenishing its continually decaying knowledge inventory,
generating new knowledge to add to it, and upgrading simple data into
information and knowledge. To accomplish this, employees constantly 'import,'
'export,' and 'transfer' data and information." p. 157.
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*** This review is made up of bits and pieces taken from POWERSHIFT: both
from the cover leaflet and from the text. A longer version, which served as a
road map for this one, was developed by James Saveland, Southeast Experiment
Station. I'll send you the longer one (nine pages) on request. The subheadings
are mine. Dave Iverson...
Bureaucracy on the Edge: The Twilight of Second Wave Managerial Control
"Any bureaucracy has two key features, which can be called 'cubbyholes' and
'channels.' Because of this, everyday power--routine control--is in the hands
of two types of executive: specialists and managers.
Specialized executives gain their power from control of information in the
cubbyholes. Managers gain theirs through their control of information flowing
through the channels. It is this power system, the backbone of bureaucracy,
which is now coming under fire in large companies everywhere." p. 166-167.
"Any serious restructure of business or government must directly attack the
organization of knowledge--and the entire system of power based on it. For the
cubbyhole system is in crisis." p. 171.
"What we see, then, is a burgeoning crisis at the very heart of bureaucracy.
High-speed change not only overwhelms its cubbyhole-and-channel structure, it
attacks the very deepest assumption on which the system was based. This is the
notion that it is possible to pre-specify who in the company needs to know what.
It is an assumption based on the idea that organizations are essentially
machines and that they operate in an orderly environment." p. 173.
"The significant fact is that we are now moving toward powerful forms of
knowledge processing that are profoundly antibureaucratic. . . . This form of
information storage and processing points toward a deep revolution in the way
we think, analyze, synthesize, and express information, and a forward leap in
organizational creativity. . . . The way we organize knowledge frequently
determines the way we organize people--and vice versa." p. 177-178.
"For all these reasons the years ahead will see [business] restructuring that
will make the recent wave of corporate shake-ups look like a placid ripple.
Specialists and managers alike will see their entrenched power threatened as
they lose control of their cubbyholes and channels. Power shifts will
reverberate throughout companies and whole industries." p. 179
Death and Rebirth for Second Wave Organizations
"[W]hen we change the relations between knowledge and production we shake the
very foundations of economic and political life. . . . There is mounting
evidence that giant firms, backbone of the smokestack economy, are too slow and
maladaptive for today's high-speed business world." p. 179-181.
"Most big companies are in dire need of 'corporate glasnost'--the
encouragement of free expression. . . . The struggle to rebuild business on
post-bureaucratic lines is partly a struggle to de-colonize the organization--to
liberate these suppressed groupings. In fact, one might say that the key
problem facing all big companies today is how to unleash the explosive,
innovative energies of these hidden colonies." p. 184.
"Most American managers still think of the organization as a 'machine' whose
parts can be tightened or loosened, 'tuned up,' or lubricated. This is the
bureaucratic metaphor. By contrast, many Japanese are already using a
post-bureaucratic metaphor--the corporation, they say, 'is a living creature.'
. . . This implies, among other things, that it undergoes birth, maturation,
aging, and death or rebirth in a new form. The Japanese term for company birth
is sogyo and many companies today speak of experiencing a second or third or
'new' sogyo.
It is precisely at this moment of rebirth that long-term success or failure
is determined. For if the new reborn firm is still organized along bureaucratic
lines, like the old one it replaces, it may have a short and unhappy second
life. By contrast, if at this moment firms are permitted to reach out in new
directions and to assume whatever organizational forms are most appropriate,
chances for adaptation to the new, innovation-rich environment are much better."
p. 185.
Ecological Relationships in Third Wave Organizations: 'Flex-firm and Democracy'
"[W]e are on the edge of the greatest shift of power in business history.
And the first signs of it are already evident in the new-style organizations
fast springing up around us. We can call them the 'flex-firms' of the future."
p. 179.
"The flex-firm concept does not imply structurelessness; it does suggest that
a company, in being reborn, may cease being a mule and turn into a team
consisting of a tiger, a school of piranhas, a mini-mule or two, and who knows,
maybe even a swarm of information sucking bees. The image underlines the point.
The business of tomorrow may embody many different formats with a single frame.
It may function as a kind of Noah's Ark.
To grasp the 'flex-firm' concept, it helps to remind ourselves that
bureaucracy is only one of an almost infinite variety of ways of organizing
human beings and information. We actually have an immense repertoire of
organizational forms to draw on--from jazz combos to espionage networks, from
tribes and clans and councils of elders to monasteries and soccer teams. Each
is good at some things and bad at others. Each has its own unique ways of
collecting and distributing information, and ways of allocating power." p. 186.
"Information is the catalyst for effecting change at every level." p. 187.
"We still see employers underestimating the revolution taking place around
them. They introduce computers and other advanced, Third Wave technologies--but
attempt to retain yesterday's Second Wave work rules and power
relationships...History has shown repeatedly that truly advanced technologies
require truly advanced work methods and organization." p. 209.
"What is happening is that the knowledge load and, more important, the
decision load are being redistributed....As a result, submissive rule-observers,
who merely follow instructions to the letter, are not good workers....Workplace
democracy, like political democracy, does not thrive when the population is
ignorant. By contrast, the more educated a population, the more democracy it
seems to demand. With advanced technology spreading, unskilled and poorly
educated workers are being squeezed out of their jobs in cutting-edge companies.
This leaves behind a more educated group, which cannot be managed in the
traditional authoritarian, don't-ask-me-any-questions fashion. In fact, asking
questions, challenging assumptions are becoming part of everyone's job." p.
211.
"It means, for one, that intelligent error needs to be tolerated. Multitudes
of bad ideas need to be floated and freely discussed, in order to harvest a
single good one. And this implies a new, liberating freedom from fear.
Fear is the primary idea-assassin. Fear of ridicule, punishment, or loss of
job destroys innovation. Smokestack management saw as its main task the
ruthless elimination of error. Innovation, in contrast, requires experimental
failure to achieve success." p. 213.
Political Struggles Overwhelmed by Other Concerns--The End of Mass Society
"Indeed, in all smokestack societies the central political struggle has not
been, as many imagine, between left and right. It has been between admirers of
First Wave agrarianism and 'traditionalism' on the one side and the forces of
Second Wave industrialism or 'modernism' on the other. . . . Such power
struggles are frequently fought under other banners--nationalism, for example,
or religion, or civil rights. They run through family life, gender relations,
schools, the professions, the arts, as well as politics. Today that historic
conflict, still raging, is being overshadowed by a new one--the struggle of a
Third Wave, postmodern civilization against both modernism and traditionalism."
p. 244-245.
"Many of our most serious environmental problems--from air pollution to toxic
waste--are by-products of the old, industrial methods of creating wealth. By
contrast, the new system, with its substitution of knowledge for material
resources, its dispersal rather than concentration, of production, its
increasing energy efficiency, and its potential for dramatic advances in
recycling technologies, holds out the hope of combining ecological sanity with
economic advance." p. 248.
"All these changes--whether rising localism, resistance to globalization,
ecological activism, or heightened ethnic and racial consciousness--reflect the
increased social diversity of advanced economies. They point to the end of the
mass society." p. 251.
"What we can expect to see, therefore, is sharpened struggle between
politicians and bureaucrats for control of the system as we make the perilous
passage from a mass to a mosaic democracy." p. 264.
"Smart politicians and officials, of course, do what smart people in general
have always done when presented with new information. They demand to know more
about its sources and the reliability of the data behind it; they ask how
samples were drawn in polls and what the response rates were; they note whether
there are inconsistencies or gaps; they question statistics that are too 'pat';
they evaluate the logic, and so forth.
Smarter power players also take into account the channels through which the
information arrived and intuitively review in their minds the various interests
who might have 'massaged' the information in transit. . . . The smartest
people--a minority of a tiny minority--do all the above, but also question
assumptions and even the deeper assumptions on which the more superficial
assumptions are based. . . . Finally, imaginative people--perhaps the fewest of
all--question the entire frame of reference. p. 285.
"To assume that such changes will happen without civil war and other
conflicts, or that they can be contained within the obsolete frame of a
nation-based world order is both shortsighted and unimaginative. The sole
certainty is that tomorrow will surprise us all.
What is brilliantly clear, then is that as the new system of wealth creation
moves across the planet it upsets all our ideas about economic development in
the so-called South, explodes socialism in the 'East,' throws allies into killer
competition, and calls into being a new, dramatically different global
order--diverse and risk-filled, at once hopeful and terrifying.
New knowledge has overturned the world we knew and shaken the pillars of
power that held it in place. Surveying the wreckage, ready once more to create
a new civilization, we stand, all together now, at Ground Zero." p. 466.
"The most important powershift of all, therefore, is not from one person,
party, institution, or nation to another. It is the hidden shift in the
relationships between violence, wealth, and knowledge as societies speed toward
their collision with tomorrow.
This is the dangerous, exhilarating secret of the Powershift Era." p. 470