management in perpetual beta

We are arriving at a break-point with the existing economy, one dominated by markets, as we enter the network era. A creative economy is emerging and our existing institutions and markets cannot deal with it. Tim O’Reilly calls this The WTF Economy, and is bringing people together to understand and deal with it.

What is the future when more and more work can be done by intelligent machines instead of people, or only done by people in partnership with those machines? What happens to workers, and what happens to the companies that depend on their purchasing power? What’s the future of business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional companies? What’s the future of education when on-demand learning outperforms traditional universities in keeping skills up to date?

The network era is changing how we think about work, from the technologies we use to the business ideologies behind them, what I call networked unmanagement.

Using the media tetrad, explained by Derrick de Kerkchove, co-author of McLuhan for Managers – every technology has four effects.

1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot);

2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or a form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);

3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the knight);

4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (automobiles, when there are too many of them, create grid lock)

Looking at management in an era of pervasive networks – individual influence is extended, business schools (and the MBA) become obsolete (reserved for the rich), communities, like guilds of old, are retrieved, but fickle networks could result in management being nothing more than theatre in service to big data. This of course, is only one way of looking at the future of management in an age of perpetual beta.

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