Learning Aesthetics

Over lunch today I suggested, probably naively, the possibility that just as ‘technology’ had made dictation and secretaries pretty much obsolete, and that ‘technology’ might just be in the process of doing something similar to managers and hierarchies. My companion, correctly assuming that I was proposing some sort of program that might be ‘implemented’, pointed out that IBM had ‘flattened’ their organization a few years back. They’d had some success, but they still have managers. Further conversation led to an agreement that if you didn’t have total staff buy in, and damn good staff, you were going to need, or at least have, managers.

Perhaps part of the difficulty is that what I’m struggling toward isn’t really implementation, but rather evolution. Someone recently pointed out that you don’t change societies by changing laws. Instead the most effective way to produce social change was to introduce a new technology into the culture. Of course it’s hard to predict exactly what kind of change you’re going to effect. What’s critical is recognizing the effect early and leveraging it to a business advantage. This isn’t trivial because all nature, including our own, is inherently conservative and the tendency is to preserve the status quo. There are, however, likely to be things that implement themselves. All of which is related, in my mind at least, to a post on The Technium on how Google does science.