There is an enormous literature relating to what BraveNewWorkWorld is all about. It includes much from the general and business press, as well as popular and business books. However, there is also a voluminous literature from many professional and academic fields, including economics, labor/industrial relations, industrial psychology, marketing, management, career testing and counseling, and many others.
Everyone who will be affected by the changes in the revolutionary new world economy-and that's everyone-probably should become a student of these changes and read regularly. However, it's unrealistic to expect most people who have other responsibilities-and that's nearly everyone-to keep up with all that's happening. You won't have to. That's part of what we're for.
Before long, you'll find reviews on this page-reviews of books, television programs, software, just about anything that's relevant to your life and work in the new economy. If you would like us to consider your book or software for review here or elsewhere, please send us a copy for examination. If you have professional expertise in an area related to the new work world and would like to write a review, please contact us as well, describing your professional interests, areas of expertise, credentials, and affiliations.
One of the hottest areas of concern right now is the rapidly changing job market. However, as important and fundamental as these changes are, we won't be focusing on them exclusively. TNWC is about all aspects of the world of work, and you'll see this reflected in our reviews and other offerings.
Now and then, when I've been referred to in the press, I've been called a "futurist," which is better than some of the things I might be called, I suppose. Nonetheless, the term has a quaint 1970's sound to it at this point. Many recent books describe current changes and speculate about the future.
Much of the futures literature from the '70's and early '80's was a bit intemperate, adopting either a "gee-whiz" or apocalyptic attitude which seemed to reflect the adversarial approach of court procedure, partisan politics, and much of contemporary journalism. TV news seems to assume that if they get one "expert" who says he believes in gravity, they've got to find another who will say he doesn't, and, then, call that "balance." The truth seems to be that polarized adversarial approaches are unlikely to be very instructive, and one might be skeptical of their ability to uncover anything resembling "truth" in any case. Yes, I recognize how this will sound to attorneys.
We respond to things in terms of how they look to us, and context and perspective help determine how they look. Perspective is very important, including historical perspective. History isn't dead: putting things into historical perspective influences how they look to us in the present, and this helps determine how we will respond to them. I recently made another trip to the British Museum simply in order to look and think and study and better inform several media and writing projects I'm involved in, most of which are intended to relate to the future somehow.
Conclusions drawn from the limited perspective of daily life are almost always inadequate and frequently flat-out wrong, even though they may be highly popular for awhile. This should make us cautious of feverish, sweaty contagions, including those in the current American political climate. Many people are highly enthusiastic about something they refer to as "common sense," and many pride themselves as being "no-nonsense." However, on close examination, we may find that some of the more common and popular ideas about work and most other things are mostly nonsense, including many highly traditional as well as many trendy things that come along on a regular basis.
"Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect," George Santayana said, and that's for sure. Do study your future in the new economy, but proceed cautiously through all that's available for you to consider. Virtually every possible point of view is available, so you can choose what is most comfortable to believe, if you like, as is usually done in partisan political arguments. However, if you choose to look through a "filter," you know how things are going to look, no matter how they really are. As Thomas Aquinas remarked, "Beware the man of one book." Read the "futurists" from the 1970's now, and it will appear that their job security depends in large part on our having the memories of barnyard geese.
There are a lot of things worth reading now, and some of them are listed below. However, our sense is that most of it still lacks sufficient perspective. For instance, you'll notice that most of the really apocalyptic book titles relating to jobs and the job market have already been taken. Nonetheless, more than thirty suggestions follow, in alphabetical order by author, with brief comments added by myself.
Are we really facing catastrophe? Maybe. Genuine catastrophes have occurred in earth history and also during the history of civilization. The calamitous 14th century comes to mind. However, I'm also reminded of the infamous so-called "Club of Rome Report" during the 1970's. According to its computer models and scholarly projections, everything should have collapsed totally long before now. Problem is, they underestimated the impact of technological innovation, which may have saved us from the expected fate, and which is accused of bringing on our demise now. See my remarks about technology in my response to Jeremy Rifkin, below.
This book should not be dismissed out of hand, though, simply because the authors' conclusions may not feel good or may not be consistent with one's preconceptions. These are bright, conscientious people, and they've done a lot of homework.
Incidentally, these should not be confused with Workforce 2000, the report published several years ago by the Hudson Institute that was so enthusiastically received by academe. This report predicted a tremendous labor shortage, particularly of the college educated, a view that seems a bit peculiar at this point, and shows some of the dangers of extrapolating or using actuarial prediction when underlying conditions have changed. The Hudson Institute was founded by Herman Kahn, the man who invented the Rand Corporation years ago, and, in the process, largely invented private "think-tanks."
It should be noted that there are spot labor shortages at the present time in some technical areas not necessarily requiring conventional college education, despite large displacements in others.
While we regard technology as resting on science now, technology really predates science. Although with classical Greek roots, modern science has developed mostly during the past few centuries, as humanity has learned to bring concepts, mathematical or otherwise, together with observations of empirical reality in highly systematic and powerful ways.
Of course, as our knowledge of nature has increased exponentially, so has our ability to apply this knowledge to practical problems and concerns. The modern technological explosion has resulted from but also has helped to fuel the explosion in scientific research and knowledge. The relationship between modern science and technology doesn't go only one way, but, instead, is interactive.
Nonetheless, technology began in prehistory. It seems to be in the nature of humanity to do things, to be tool maker and tool user, to act on and influence the environment in ways that serve perceived human needs and purposes.
This is an academic, not a popular book, but it is quite readable.
Not all that good either, if you want a deeper understanding with broad perspective, which is what we'll all need in the long-run. We all want our physicians to be very thorough and highly sophisticated-sophisticated not like Ivana Trump, but like the Mayo Clinic. We need no less in other complex areas of life.
The wonderful Mr. Drucker largely invented management consulting about fifty years ago with his landmark analysis of General Motors, and is often given credit for helping to invent professional management as a discipline. Over the years since, he has produced a continuing series of highly provocative books analyzing management, business, and socioeconocultural life generally.
His broad perspective is a consequence of his enormous erudition and astonishing talent combined with his great years. Now nearing ninety, Peter Drucker's crystal clear memory encompasses most of the 20th century, and his powers and penetrating insight seem undiminished. I believe he is significant far beyond the corporate world with which he has been identified, and I'm delighted that we still have the benefit of his instruction during this historic period symbolized by the imminent end of the millennium. The familiar world is dissolving before our eyes, to be swept away. A new world-exciting, unfamiliar, frightening-is taking its place. Drucker is as good a tour guide as any.
If you want perspective, read Drucker; but, don't read Drucker if you insist on looking at the world through a stereotypical caricature of either "liberal" or "conservative" thought, because, sooner or later, he will infuriate you in either case. Not for "fuzzy-headed crackpot liberals" or for "Limbeciles" either. He soars far above partisan dichotomies and insults.
One of the reasons that Peter Drucker is so interesting, provocative, and valuable may be that, despite his having been a professor in several disciplines over many years, he is not a product of the conventional academic culture. When he completed secondary school in Europe, rather than going to college, he simply went to work. It was while he was working as a newspaper reporter in Frankfurt that he began night school. Later, while still young, he worked as a senior economist for a major London bank, although I don't believe he holds a degree in economics.
Drucker has written dozens of books, beginning with The End of Economic Man in the 1930's. Two of his latest are listed above, but don't stop with them.
Incidentally, leading American industrial psychologist Warren Bennis has written the preface for the first book. Bennis was a university president for a brief period, and was last seen running from the campus screaming and tearing at his hair. Kidding, but only slightly. He's written about the experience.
For example, assuming no large scale catastrophes, he finds it difficult to envision a realistic scenario by which China will not have the world's largest economy by 2020. This will give it a commensurate amount of political influence in the world community as well, something that is likely to trouble many persons in Western-style democracies. However, it's unlikely that the political system in its present form will be able to withstand the enormous economic changes that are occurring. In fact, the fast-growth economic zones are already becoming semi-autonomous political entities. China will not necessarily survive as a single, centralized political system.
There are major differences among the three major economic regions of the world. On average, Europe has the greatest government participation in social welfare, East Asia the least, North America somewhere in between.
America sends a larger proportion of its population into post-secondary education, but with results that are a mixture of the best, the mediocre, and the worst (not necessarily correlated with cost or size and reputation of the institution, incidentally). East Asia, modeling Japan's rote approach to K-12 education, tends to produce high levels of performance, at least narrowly defined, but without fostering the high levels of individual creativity and judgment that will be increasingly key to economic success. The best of North America's graduate schools probably remain the best in the world, and will continue to attract high levels of participation from other parts of the world, at least for awhile, so America will continue to be a higher ed "exporter."
The most dramatic rates of economic growth have occurred in East Asia, first in Japan, then Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea, most recently in China; but, while the boom continues, it is fragile, according to McRae. For one thing, despite the American and European tendency toward stereotypical thinking with regard to Asians, instead of being "mostly alike," the truth is that there is far more diversity of nearly every sort in East Asia than in either North America or Europe. An integrated "Asian economy" will not happen soon, because there are so many people there who have so little in common, culturally, historically, or in most other ways.
Also, during the past half century, Americans have gone from demonizing the Japanese to idealizing or romanticizing their industrial prowess. Neither is realistic. As a people, they are simply human beings, made out of the same stuff as the rest of us; economically, it's easy to exaggerate their infallibility, or the extent to which their techniques will transfer to other settings. Also, it's easy to exaggerate the breadth, depth, or durability of Japan's economic "miracle," although, at least in the short run, Japan will probably be the world's banker and venture capitalist.
America saves the least, reflecting both its relative lack of discipline and its optimism. Its high level of consumption helps support East Asia's dependence on the American market, and contributes to the current trade imbalance, as well as the fragility of the East Asian boom. Higher levels of savings provide an important source of capital to finance high rates of growth in Asia; but, as Drucker points out, a particular type of savings, pension funds, have largely financed American business during recent years as well.
I've traveled quite a bit during the past year or so, both domestically and internationally. For example, I arrived in Seoul in late June 1994, about the time U.S. News & World Report was running a cover story about Korea as "the most dangerous place on earth." I had lived in South Korea briefly during the early '70's, and I was struck by the dramatic economic changes that are reflected in their astonishing statistics. In the early '70's, South Korea really was a poor third-world country; now it is a modern industrial giant with the fifteenth economy in the world, all in a space about two-thirds the size of North Dakota. A remarkably bright, industrious people have created wonders.
However, as McRae points out, one of the sources of East Asian economic fragility is the relative weakness of their infrastructure, which, in order to foster immediate growth, has been neglected, but which will be needed for the long haul. This problem is apparent in South Korea. For example, Seoul has a tremendous air pollution problem, and there have been dramatic recent structural failures-e.g., bridges, buildings-that have resulted in great loss of life.
In short, I recommend this book. You might want to read it before reading any of the others, because we're all going to be living and working in a global economy from now on. More than ever before, events on a global scale will have consequences dribbling down to local communities, influencing individual situations. You must understand the tides, if you are to understand what is happening to the few gallons of water you're standing in.
Nonetheless, whether you accept his "trends" as resting on a solid factual foundation, or whether you regard them as interesting but tentative hypotheses (I prefer the latter), he and his co-author are provocative.
However, some professors still haven't discovered that academe itself remains one of the last credentials-oriented outposts. The world off campus has become increasingly competence-oriented, performance-oriented, not credentials-oriented, and there is growing realization that there has never been more than a moderate relationship between so-called "credentials," on the one hand, and genuine competence and performance in most fields, on the other.
I don't agree with everything Reich has to say about work or education, but it shouldn't be necessary to do that in order to recognize a person's gifts and relevance. I fall slightly short of perfection myself. His 1991 book provides an extremely competent overview of the new economy. Still recommended.
I have not seen the videoconference, but it caught my eye, because the Blackwell Corporation is the underwriter and producer of public television's "TechnoPolitics" which often reflects a different point of view from Reich's. Let a zillion flowers bloom. This is an historic period we're going through, and it would be outrageous to expect that anybody has everything right at this early point. Nobody can even see all that's happening, let alone understand it all or anticipate all of its implications. This is not a time to limit ourselves.
Still, Jeremy seems to be all over the place. The fact that one of his early books was called Entropy may suggest the way he looks at things. The concept of "entropy" is from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and, simply put, means that, in a closed system, everything eventually goes to hell. Problem is, the sorts of things with which TNWC is mostly concerned may not constitute a closed system in the ordinary sense, or, at least, not on a practical time scale. Open systems are ones sustained by inputs from the "outside," and a principal input in the case of the economic system seems to be technological innovation.
Most fundamentally, "technology" is not so much a matter of machines as the use of knowledge, and, of course, this implies the appropriate use of knowledge. One does not have to be a Luddite in order to be wary of inappropriate uses of technology. We don't have to adopt the sort of "all benefits, no costs or risks" attitude that predominated during the post-War era, particularly in the 1950's when Ronald Reagan worked for General Electric and kept emphasizing that progress was their "most important product."
While Reagan never seemed to recover from 1950's technological naivete´ -witness his "star wars" initiative, which apparently made most of his technical advisors faint dead away when he announced it-many others have moved far beyond Reagan's attitudes and Rifkin's as well.
It's very easy to exaggerate the advantages of being guided by uninformed judgment or passionate ignorance. To be a "techno-optimist" seems mostly a matter of being optimistic about those attributes that most define our humanity, and these are not our base instincts, capacities for prejudice and stupidity, or either paralyzing anxieties or excessive enthusiasms.
Fellow gloomarian Robert Heilbroner provides the preface to The End of Work. Again, I don't know that doom is not upon us at this very moment. However, while optimism doesn't always work, pessimism almost never does. I recall Dr. Alan Kay's remark that the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Slater examines the long history of authoritarian hierarchical social organization and recent attempts to invent a viable alternative, namely democracy, which he feels we have only so far roughly approximated, one painful step at a time-including a step or two backward at times.
Among other things, he claims that democracy is not only the only genuinely just way of organizing society (and its parts), but, also, that during a period of rapid and fundamental change, in particular, it is also the most efficient way of getting things done.
Tom Peters' "thriving on chaos," "destruction of hierarchy" notions come readily to mind. Authoritarian hierarchies don't give up easily, though, and a tremendous mythology has grown up around them, despite their tremendous inefficiencies and the disasters they have generated. Nonetheless, there is ample evidence that fluid, ad hoc structure seems to be the way the economy is going. One painful consequence of this transition is the reduction in the number of "jobs," as we have understood them. Peters has pointed out that, even though a larger proportion of the adult workforce is self-employed now than twenty years ago, it's still a far smaller proportion than at the turn of the century and before. What is the historical norm?
I don't think Slater's book had the impact that it should have had when it came out. It may have been a little ahead of its time, so now may be the perfect time to read it. However, as smart and wise as he is, I suspect that he's a bit too innocent politically for the current simplistic political climate in which, among other things, the First Amendment is under fire from both the right and the left, suggesting far too much preoccupation with words as opposed to ideas and things. He occasionally gratuitously uses words that will elicit reflexive responses from some readers and make it too easy for them to dismiss him without giving much thought. However, both genuinely smart "conservatives" and genuinely smart "liberals" will find a lot to think about here.
However, they may be picking up the pace now. Their latest, which I have not read, has just recently hit the shelves and contains a forward by their longtime friend, Newt Gingrich.
Toffler didn't invent futures studies, but he did give "futurism" popularity, and probably remains the best known futurist in the world. It is sobering to think that when Future Shock was published in 1970, that major engine of modern change, the microprocessor, had not yet been released.
Nonetheless, I'm not sure what to think about the Tofflers. About the time I become convinced that Freudian psychology is dead and gone, I start to read about "repressed memories" in the newspaper every day and overhear Yuppies referring to somebody as "anal."
Similarly with all this "third wave" stuff. The Toffler book came out in 1980, but I'm sure I had been talking about similar things for years earlier, and I surely didn't invent those ideas. Now, "third wave" thinking seems to be the rage in Washington. It makes you wonder. Are there people there who still haven't heard about the Norman invasion