James W. Cortada - 21st Century Business

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To my children, Beth and Julia, who are entering a fascinating New World of work

The business climate today is in a state of flux, evolving in many ways, but essentially from the forms familiar to managers and workers during the Second Industrial Revolution into new ones. For sake of convenience, I call the new environment the Information Age, and we work in the New Digital Economy because the Internet has changed so much how we use computers and work. This book is about what tasks both managers and workers in this period of transition from one economic order to another are doing and need to do to be successful. The answer lies largely in doing three things. First, managers have to perform many basic tasks of management essentially unchanged from one decade to another. For example, managers still have to run organizations that generate a profit. Second, both managers and workers need to leverage technologies quickly and effectively and, in the process, adapt to the consequences of such actions. You see this strategy already at workusing the Internet for new channels of distribution of products and servicesbut the activities required extend far beyond this new merger of computing and telecommunications. Third, most managers and workers have to work effectively in companies (even government agencies) that live in two worlds, that of the old Industrial Age and in the emerging Information Age.

This book is about how to carry out these new requirements. In the early 1990s, an author of a book such as this would have had to defend the notion that things were changing. Today, such an author finds readers very familiar and accepting of the notion that things are changing, often very rapidly. So, the discussion has moved on to the next level, what to do about it. While I have a great deal to say about what people are doing and need to do, let me begin by delivering some good news: The fundamentals of management, as described, for example, by Peter Drucker in more than a dozen books and 35 articles, still apply. What is changing is how these fundamentals are being executed because there have been important technological changes in the past decade, such as the arrival of the Internet. The services and knowledge content of work has increased sharply as well. Most workers today are also experiencing the consequences of the simultaneous survival of pre- and post-industrial economies in many industries and in various nations.

Noneconomic conditions have also changed, affecting workers around the world. The Cold War is over, and one consequence has been an enormous expansion of international trade. One byproduct has been the growth of free trade practices. A second has been both the expansion of democracies (especially in Latin America and in Central Europe) but also significant chaos in what used to be the old Soviet Union. It became more difficult to do business in Russia, but a lot easier to sell goods in China.

Economic sociologists argue that we are moving from economies that focused on the physical manufacture of goods to new ones in which assets are information and knowledge, where the key skills are not centered around making things but around using information technology. Microsoft is worth more than General Motors. Welcome to a new work environment! There are many issues, but the central one is how are we to respond to change? Change is taking place at different speeds across various industries. It is playing out in various forms around the world. In this book I recognize and accept that change is occurring, often profoundly, butand this is where my message differs from that of many other commentatorsit is occurring more in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary manner. Looked at over long historic periods, as opposed to just over the past couple of years, I conclude that the adjective evolutionary is a more accurate way of describing what is going on. It is from that perspective of viewing events as evolving that I find answers to the questions about how you can thrive in such a period of change. To be sure, change is more or less intense from one industry to another, and occurs at an uneven pace. Successful managers and workers view their duties as more than just keeping up with the Internet and e-everything. To be successful, the key insight they need is to apply many of the basics of business and managerial practice either in response to changing circumstances or to create those changes, and to do it holistically, thoughtfully, but with a grip on reality.

This book is written for anybody who works today, particularly in highly industrialized (economists would say "advanced") economies. I address my comments to the skilled and experienced employee and to the newly minted MBA who knows her way around the Internet. The senior executive also needs help because he or she worries about the implications of many of the new technologies causing changes in their industry. Middle managers often feel the crush of change earliest in an organization, since they are the ones who normally alter processes, buy and use computers, and experience the consequences of changing market conditions. This book is very much intended to reassure them that the changes underway can be exploited to make their work rational and successful, although their lives will remain fraught with change and churn.

As enterprises increasingly came to share managerial responsibilities with non-managerial employees over the past two decades, it became essential for "empowered" workers to understand and practice the basics of management. As members of teams, as process owners, and as users of an organization's assets, they had, for all intents and purposes, assumed many of the roles and responsibilities of managers. This role is as profound a change as the arrival of the Internet, for instance. There is a melding of manager/non-manager roles, even though traditional command-and-control and hierarchical organizations still exist. Because the roles of managers and non-managers are blending together, yet often simultaneously remain apart, I frequently apply the terms management or managers to the tasks of workers.