Posted 8/26/2010 06:58:00 PM by Douglas

At the end of the 20^th century, CEOs of the world's biggest companies wielded more power, money, and control over people's fate than the men that controlled small to medium sized countries. "Management" became the buzzword that meant you made it in business, and the MBA diploma-mills churned 'em out by the thousands, while the billboards on the side of the road begged for even more. The 21^st century, primarily the internet, has changed all that in less than 20 years. Will the business world learn in time?

The reasons for this are clear enough. Corporations are bureaucracies and managers are bureaucrats. Their fundamental tendency is toward self-perpetuation. They are, almost by definition, resistant to change. They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market.

Until they have to, or someone comes along and figures out how to do it better than you can. RIAA, GM, print media. I'm looking in your direction. The ability to collaborate on the net is astounding, but:

Even the most starry-eyed techno-enthusiasts have a hard time imagining, say, a Boeing 787 built by "mass collaboration." Still, the trends here are big and undeniable. Change is rapidly accelerating. Transaction costs are rapidly diminishing. And as a result, everything we learned in the last century about managing large corporations is in need of a serious rethink. We have both a need and an opportunity to devise a new form of economic organization, and a new science of management, that can deal with the breakneck realities of 21st century change.

At the end of the day, we have to make something, for gawd's sake. Wall Street can't just keep sweeping up the crumbs of other people's production without creating anything. The world's "Financial" center shifted from London to New York when the UK decided to become a "service economy." It won't take the bloodsucking beancounters very long to figure out they didn't move far enough east when the United States has resigned itself to swapping it's own socks with one another.