Today such savings are feverishly sought by managers fighting to keep up with change. Shortcuts that by-pass the hierarchy are increasingly employed in thousands of factories, offices, laboratories, even in the military. The cumulative result of such small changes is a massive shift from vertical to lateral communication systems. The intended result is speedier communication. This leveling process, however, represents a major blow to the once-sacred bureaucratic hierarchy, and it punches a jagged hole in the "brain and hand" analogy. For as the vertical chain of command is increasingly by-passed, we find "hands" beginning to make decisions, too. When the worker by-passes his foreman or supervisor and calls in a repair team, he makes a decision that in the past was reserved for these "higher ups."
This silent but significant deterioration of hierarchy, now occurring in the executive suite as well as at the ground level of the factory floor, is intensified by the arrival on the scene of hordes of experts – specialists in vital fields so narrow that often the men on top have difficulty understanding them. Increasingly, managers have to rely on the judgment of these experts. Solid state physicists, computer programmers, systems designers, operation researchers, engineering specialists – such men are assuming a new decision-making function. At one time, they merely consulted with executives who reserved unto themselves the right to make managerial decisions. Today, the managers are losing their monopoly on decision-making.
More and more, says Professor Read of McGill, the "specialists do not fit neatly together into a chain-of-command system" and "cannot wait for their expert advice to be approved at a higher level." With no time for decisions to wend their leisurely way up and down the hierarchy, "advisors" stop merely advising and begin to make decisions themselves. Often they do this in direct consultation with the workers and ground-level technicians.
As a result, says Frank Metzger, director of personnel planning for International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, "You no longer have the strict allegiance to hierarchy. You may have five or six different levels of the hierarchy represented in one meeting. You try to forget about salary level and hierarchy, and organize to get the job done."
Such facts, according to Professor Read, "represent a staggering change in thinking, action, and decision-making in organizations." Quite possibly, he declares, "the only truly effective methods for preventing, or coping with, problems of coordination and communication in our changing technology will be found in new arrangements of people and tasks, in arrangements which sharply break with the bureaucratic tradition."
It will be a long time before the last bureaucratic hierarchy is obliterated. For bureaucracies are well suited to tasks that require masses of moderately educated men to perform routine operations, and, no doubt, some such operations will continue to be performed by men in the future. Yet it is precisely such tasks that the computer and automated equipment do far better than men. It is clear that in super-industrial society many such tasks will be performed by great self-regulating systems of machines, doing away with the need for bureaucratic organization. Far from fastening the grip of bureaucracy on civilization more tightly than before, automation leads to its overthrow.
As machines take over routine tasks and the accelerative thrust increases the amount of novelty in the environment, more and more of the energy of society (and its organizations) must turn toward the solution of non-routine problems. This requires a degree of imagination and creativity that bureaucracy, with its man-in-a-slot organization, its permanent structures, and its hierarchies, is not well equipped to provide. Thus it is not surprising to find that wherever organizations today are caught up in the stream of technological or social change, wherever research and development is important, wherever men must cope with first-time problems, the decline of bureaucratic forms is most pronounced. In these frontier organizations a new system of human relations is springing up.
To live, organizations must cast off those bureaucratic practices that immobilize them, making them less sensitive and less rapidly responsive to change. The result, according to Joseph A. Raffaele, Professor of Economics at Drexel Institute of Technology, is that we are moving toward a "working society of technical co-equals" in which the "line of demarcation between the leader and the led has become fuzzy." Super-industrial Man, rather than occupying a permanent, cleanly-defined slot and performing mindless routine tasks in response to orders from above, finds increasingly that he must assume decision-making responsibility – and must do so within a kaleidoscopically changing organization structure built upon highly transient human relationships. Whatever else might be said, this is not the old, familiar Weberian bureaucracy at which so many of our novelists and social critics are still, belatedly, hurling their rusty javelins.
BEYOND BUREAUCRACY
If it was Max Weber who first defined bureaucracy and predicted its triumph, Warren Bennis may go down in sociological textbooks as the man who first convincingly predicted its demise and sketched the outlines of the organizations that are springing up to replace it. At precisely the moment when the outcry against bureaucracy was reaching its peak of shrillness on American campuses and elsewhere, Bennis, a social psychologist and professor of industrial management, predicted flatly that "in the next twenty-five to fifty years" we will all "participate in the end of bureaucracy." He urged us to begin looking "beyond bureaucracy."
Thus Bennis argues that "while various proponents of 'good human relations' have been fighting bureaucracy on humanistic grounds and for Christian values, bureaucracy seems most likely to founder on its inability to adapt to rapid change ...
"Bureaucracy," he says, "thrives in a highly competitive undifferentiated and stable environment, such as the climate of its youth, the Industrial Revolution. A pyramidal structure of authority, with power concentrated in the hands of a few ... was, and is, an eminently suitable social arrangement for routinized tasks. However, the environment has changed in just those ways which make the mechanism most problematic. Stability has vanished."
Each age produces a form of organization appropriate to its own tempo. During the long epoch of agricultural civilization, societies were marked by low transience. Delays in communication and transportation slowed the rate at which information moved. The pace of individual life was comparatively slow. And organizations were seldom called upon to make what we would regard as high-speed decisions.
The age of industrialism brought a quickened tempo to both individual and organizational life. Indeed, it was precisely for this reason that bureaucratic forms were needed. For all that they seem lumbering and inefficient to us, they were, on the average, capable of making better decisions faster than the loose and ramshackle organizations that preceded them. With all the rules codified, with a set of fixed principles indicating how to deal with various work problems, the flow of decisions could be accelerated to keep up with the faster pace of life brought by industrialism.
Weber was keen enough to notice this, and he pointed out that "The extraordinary increase in the speed by which public announcements, as well as economic and political facts are transmitted exerts a steady and sharp pressure in the direction of speeding up the tempo of administrative reaction ..." He was mistaken, however, when he said "The optimum of such reaction time is normally attained only by a strictly bureaucratic organization." For it is now clear that the acceleration of change has reached so rapid a pace that even bureaucracy can no longer keep up. Information surges through society so rapidly, drastic changes in technology come so quickly that newer, even more instantly responsive forms of organization must characterize the future.
What, then, will be the characteristics of the organizations of super-industrial society? "The key word," says Bennis, "will be 'temporary'; there will be adaptive, rapidly changing temporary systems." Problems will be solved by task forces composed of "relative strangers who represent a set of diverse professional skills."
Executives and managers in this system will function as coordinators between the various transien
t work teams. They will be skilled in understanding the jargon of different groups of specialists, and they will communicate across groups, translating and interpreting the language of one into the language of another. People in this system will, according to Bennis, "be differentiated not vertically, according to rank and role, but flexibly and functionally, according to skill and professional training."
Because of the high rate of movement back and forth from one transient team to another, he continues, "There will ... be a reduced commitment to work groups ... While skills in human interaction will become more important, due to the growing needs for collaboration in complex tasks, there will be a concomitant reduction in group cohesiveness ... People will have to learn to develop quick and intense relationships on the job, and learn to bear the loss of more enduring work relationships."
This then is a picture of the coming Ad-hocracy, the fast-moving, information-rich, kinetic organization of the future, filled with transient cells and extremely mobile individuals. From this sketch, moreover, it is possible to deduce some of the characteristics of the human beings who will populate these new organizations – and who, to some extent, are already to be found in the prototype organizations of today. What emerges is dramatically different from the stereotype of the organization man. For just as the acceleration of change and increased novelty in the environment demand a new form of organization, they demand, too, a new kind of man.
Three of the outstanding characteristics of bureaucracy were, as we have seen, permanence, hierarchy, and a division of labor. These characteristics molded the human beings who manned the organizations. Permanence – the recognition that the link between man and organization would endure through time – brought with it a commitment to the organization. The longer the man stayed within its embrace, the more he saw his past as an investment in the organization, the more he saw his personal future as dependent upon that of the organization. Longevity bred loyalty. In work organizations, this natural tendency was powerfully reinforced by the knowledge that termination of one's links with the organization very often meant a loss of the means of economic survival. In a world wracked by scarcity for the many, a job was precious. The bureaucrat was thus immobile and deeply oriented toward economic security. To keep his job, he willingly subordinated his own interests and convictions to those of the organization.
Power-laden hierarchies, through which authority flowed, wielded the whip by which the individual was held in line. Knowing that his relationship with the organization would be relatively permanent (or at least hoping that it would be) the organization man looked within for approval. Rewards and punishments came down the hierarchy to the individual, so that the individual, habitually looking upward at the next rung of the hierarchical ladder, became conditioned to subservience. Thus: the wishy-washy organization man – the man without personal convictions (or without the courage to make them evident). It paid to conform.
Finally, the organization man needed to understand his place in the scheme of things; he occupied a well-defined niche, performed actions that were also well-defined by the rules of the organization, and he was judged by the precision with which he followed the book. Faced by relatively routine problems, he was encouraged to seek routine answers. Unorthodoxy, creativity, venturesomeness were discouraged, for they interfered with the predictability required by the organization of its component parts.
The embryonic Ad-hocracies of today demand a radically different constellation of human characteristics. In place of permanence, we find transience – high mobility between organizations, never-ending reorganizations within them, and a constant generation and decay of temporary work groupings. Not surprisingly, we witness a decline in old-fashioned "loyalty" to the organization and its sub-structures.
Writing about young executives in American industry today, Walter Guzzardi, Jr., declares: "The agreements between modern man and modern organization are not like the laws of the Medes and the Persians. They were not made to stand forever ... The man periodically examines his own attitude toward the organization, and gauges its attitude toward him. If he doesn't like what he sees, he tries to change it. If he can't change it, he moves." Says executive recruiter George Peck: "The number of top executives with their resumes in their desk drawer is amazing."
The old loyalty felt by the organization man appears to be going up in smoke. In its place we are watching the rise of professional loyalty. In all of the techno-societies there is a relentless increase in the number of professional, technical and other specialists. In the United States between 1950 and 1969 alone, their number has more than doubled and this class continues to grow more rapidly than any other group in the work force. Instead of operating as individual, entrepreneurial free lancers, millions of engineers, scientists, psychologists, accountants and other professionals have entered the ranks of organization. What has happened as a result is a neat dialectical reversal. Veblen wrote about the industrialization of the professional. Today we are observing the professionalization of industry.
Thus John Gardner declares: "The loyalty of the professional man is to his profession and not to the organization that may house him at any given moment. Compare the chemist or electronics engineer in a local plant with the non-professional executives in the same plant. The men the chemist thinks of as his colleagues are not those who occupy neighboring offices, but his fellow professionals wherever they may be throughout the country, even throughout the world. Because of his fraternal ties with widely dispersed contemporaries, he himself is highly mobile. But even if he stays in one place his loyalty to the local organization is rarely of the same quality as that of the true organization man. He never quite believes in it.
"The rise of the professions means that modern large-scale organization has been heavily infiltrated by men who have an entirely different concept of what organization is about ..." In effect, these men are "outsiders" working within the system.
At the same time, the term "profession" is itself taking on new meaning. Just as the vertical hierarchies of bureaucracy break down under the combined impact of new technology, new knowledge, and social change, so too, do the horizontal hierarchies that have until now divided human knowledge. The old boundaries between specialties are collapsing. Men increasingly find that the novel problems thrust at them can be solved only by reaching beyond narrow disciplines.
The traditional bureaucrat put electrical engineers in one compartment and psychologists in another. Indeed, engineers and psychologists in their own professional organizations assumed an airtight distinction between their spheres of knowledge and competence. Today, however, in the aerospace industry, in education, and in other fields, engineers and psychologists are frequently thrown together in transient teams. New organizations reflecting these sometimes exotic intellectual mergers are springing up all around the basic professions, so that we begin to find sub-groupings of bio-mathematicians, psycho-pharmacologists, engineer-librarians and computer-musicians. Distinctions between the disciplines do not disappear; but they become finer, more porous, and there is a constant reshuffling process.
In this situation, even professional loyalties turn into short-term commitments, and the work itself, the task to be done, the problem to be solved, begins to elicit the kind of commitment hitherto reserved for the organization. Professional specialists, according to Bennis, "seemingly derive their rewards from inward standards of excellence, from their professional societies, and from the intrinsic satisfaction of their task. In fact, they are committed to the task, not the job; to their standards, not their boss. And because they have degrees, they travel. They are not good 'company men'; they are uncommitted except to the challenging environments where they can 'play with problems.'"
These men of the future already man some of the Ad-hocracies that exist today. There is excitement and creativity in the computer industry, in educational technology, in the application of systems techniques to urban problems, in the new oceanography industry, in government agencies co
ncerned with environmental health, and elsewhere. In each of these fields, more representative of the future than the past, there is a new venturesome spirit which stands in total contrast to the security-minded orthodoxy and conformity associated with the organization man.
The new spirit in these transient organizations is closer to that of the entrepreneur than the organization man. The free-swinging entrepreneur who started up vast enterprises unafraid of defeat or adverse opinion, is a folk hero of industrialism, particularly in the United States. Pareto labeled the entrepreneurs "adventurous souls, hungry for novelty ... not at all alarmed at change."
It is conventional wisdom to assert that the age of the entrepreneur is dead, and that in his place there now stand only organization men or bureaucrats. Yet what is happening today is a resurgence of entrepreneurialism within the heart of large organizations. The secret behind this reversal is the new transience and the death of economic insecurity for large masses of educated men. With the rise of affluence has come a new willingness to take risks. Men are willing to risk failure because they cannot believe they will ever starve. Thus says Charles Elwell, director of industrial relations for Hunt Foods: "Executives look at themselves as individual entrepreneurs who are selling their knowledge and skills." Indeed, as Max Ways has pointed out in Fortune: "The professional man in management has a powerful base of independence – perhaps a firmer base than the small businessman ever had in his property rights."
Thus we find the emergence of a new kind of organization man – a man who, despite his many affiliations, remains basically uncommitted to any organization. He is willing to employ his skills and creative energies to solve problems with equipment provided by the organization, and within temporary groups established by it. But he does so only so long as the problems interest him. He is committed to his own career, his own self-fulfillment.
Future Shock Page 14
