All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization by Walter Truett Anderson

Author:Walter Truett Anderson [Anderson, Walter Truett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Globalization, Social Science, Political Science, Sociology, Politics, General
ISBN: 9780429721588
Google: CKubDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 661223
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2001-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Some of this can be discounted as the overheated prose of consultants fishing for clients, but it is also, for the most part, sound advice. A corporation that becomes too attached to its old ways of doing things—even if those old ways were new ways a short time before—is likely to be vulnerable in a global economy that is not only highly productive but also highly competitive. Old household-name companies sometimes find themselves in serious trouble, forced to watch newcomers and new products emerge from nowhere and become enormously successful, at least for a while.

Take, for example, the fate of the forty-three companies that Tom Peters and Robert Waterman cited as examples of "excellent" (meaning, of course, successful) firms in their 1982 book In Search of Excellence.8 Just five years later, Richard Pascale of Stanford University reviewed their list and reported that about two-thirds of the excellents were in moderate-to-serious trouble, and only fourteen were still measurably superior to their competitors.9 After Pascale wrote his critique, several of the fourteen survivors—notably two early leaders in the computer field, International Business Machines (IBM) and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)—also ran into some big rocks in the rapids. IBM went through major restructuring and, although now in good health, has never regained the dominant position it once held. Digital had even more serious problems and was subsequently swallowed by Compaq.

The key to effective change, according to current management theory, is learning. The successful organization is the learning organization, which is continually probing its environment, observing current events, peering into the future, modifying its ways of doing things, and when necessary, reinventing itself. The leader of such an organization is not so much the iron-willed captain of industry who sets the course and steers the organization in that direction at whatever cost, but rather a learning leader who is more a designer and teacher. Such leaders, according to Senge, "are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models—that is, they are responsible for learning."10 This also introduces a new dimension into one of the central elements of modern management, planning. This new dimension is admirably summed up in the title of Donald Michael's book Learning to Plan—and Planning to Learn.11

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