Assorted Items

Dinner Party Tomorrow! [See entry below for details]

Essembly. What is it?
www.essembly.com is a social networking website- kind of a facebook with the ability to vote on "resolves." Resolves are statements for which agreement or disagreement is possible- for example, "I support equal rights for women." On essembly, you're given a place to create resolves, vote on them, and comment about them. Create an account and join the Essembly CLR group!

Computers and the Destruction of Bureaucracy
(A possible topic for next week)

Computers make decisionmaking and information transfer scores earlier by compiling large amounts of information and allowing an individual to generate documents in much less time than it used to take. Computers (and especially the internet) also created a gigantic economic and productivity boom and expansion lasting many years. That was the win in this economic situation. What was the loss? Nothing, except the destruction of the organizational lifestyle Americans have gotten used to since the industrial revolution...

Peter Drucker (professional visionary) in 1988: "The typical large business 20 years hence will have fewer than half the level of managements of its counterpart today, and no more than a third of the managers. In its structure, and in its management problems and concerns, it will bear little resemblance to the typical management company, circa 1950, which our textbooks still consider the norm. Instead it is far more likely to resemble organizations that neither the practicing manager nor the management scholar pays much attention to today: the hospital, the university, the symphony orchestra. For like them, the typical business will be knowledge based, an organization composed largely of specialists who direct and discipline their own performance through an organized feedback from colleagues, customers, and headquarters. For this reason, it will be called what I call an information-based organization.

... [In the new information based organization], it becomes clear that both the number of management levels and the number of managers can be sharply cut. The reason is straightforward: it turns out that whole layers of management neither make decisions nor lead. Instead, their main, if not their only function is to serve as "relays" - human boosters for the faint, unfocust signals that pass for communication in the traditional pre-information organization."

From "The Coming of the new Organization," by Peter F. Drucker and Managing Engineering and Technology, by Lucy C. Morse and Daniel L. Babcock

One sort of "democratized" business: http://www.fastcompany.com/online/28/ge.html