Mindless by Simon Head

Author:Simon Head [Head, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465069743
Publisher: Basic Books

7

THE MILITARY HALF

COMPUTER BUSINESS SYSTEMS HAVE A HISTORY GOING BACK AT least seventy years to the Second World War, and the length and depth of this history have been powerful forces shaping today’s systems. Among the most remarkable pieces of evidence we have of this history’s role is an article, “Management in the 1980s,” which appeared in the November–December 1958 edition of the Harvard Business Review. The authors, Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler, were at the time professors of business administration at the University of Chicago. In their piece Leavitt and Whisler are credited with the first-ever use of the term information technology, and this alone gives their piece landmark status.

With their predictions about the future of information technology and corporate management, Leavitt and Whisler were not flying entirely blind. When they did their research in the late 1950s, there were already rudimentary civilian CBSs in existence that contained enough of the DNA of future systems for discerning observers like Leavitt and Whisler to figure out how the systems might evolve in the coming decades. In their piece Leavitt and Whisler describe how, at an unnamed manufacturing plant, computer programmers “have had some successes in displacing the judgment and experience of production schedulers,” thereby “displacing the weekly scheduling meeting of production, sales and supply people.” Such programs were also being worked out in increasing numbers “to yield decisions about product mixes, warehousing, capital budgeting and so forth.”

As their title suggests, Leavitt and Whisler were interested not just in describing the systems taking shape around them in their own times, but also in figuring out how the systems might evolve in the coming decades and how they might transform the structure of corporate management. Their forecasts of fifty-five years ago have turned out to be uncannily accurate, more accurate indeed than many of the pieces dealing with contemporary management systems now appearing in the contemporary scholarly literature. Writing at a time when the United States was still indisputably the world’s leading industrial power, Leavitt and Whisler assumed that the American industrial model that had taken shape during the first half of the twentieth century would continue to shape how the newly emerging technologies would be used during the century’s second half. This is essentially what has happened, and Leavitt and Whisler’s forecasts have withstood the test of time exceptionally well.

Leavitt and Whisler’s piece is significant as much for its forecasts of managerial winners and losers as it is for their forecasts of what future technologies might look like. They predicted that middle managers would be the big losers. They would lose skills, function, and power; be reduced in numbers; and be paid less. “There will be many fewer middle managers, and most of those who remain are likely to be routine technicians rather than thinkers.”1 The middle loses out because skilled tasks that they had hitherto performed, such as the gathering and analysis of data and the scheduling of production, would be taken over by information systems. These data

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