SIX DEAD
Propositions of the Last Generation

ONE: Turnover in Personnel is BAD

TWO: Everyone Should be Professional

THREE: Managers Generate Efficiency and Profits

FOUR: Treat Employees Consistently

FIVE: Divide and Control

SIX: People Need Jobs

These propositions certainly were alive in the last generation, but some of them have been silently directing and shaping organizational action for centuries. They grow out of elements in the very DNA of management.

In the last generation, Alvin Toffler (The Third Wave, 1980) identified the six hidden, interconnected elements of design found in all Industrial Age structures: Standardization, Specialization, Synchronization, Concentration, Maximization and Centralization. He wrote: “Every civilization has a hidden code – a set of rules or principals that run through all its activities like a repeated design. As industrialism pushed across the planet, its unique hidden design became visible.

Over two hundred years earlier, in establishing the philosophies of the Industrial Age, Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, 1776) envisioned an industrial economic system that would revolve around a new type of work: what we would later call “management.” Smith taught the world to work in efficient factories, in jobs of ever-decreasing size and importance, which, nevertheless, created great wealth for over two centuries.

During the last century, we tapped out these ancient principles and philosophies. We entered the Information Age, which demands a completely new code.