This Content Is Only For Subscribers
We do face problems of major manufacture an inadequate rate of economic growth, an educational system that does not meet our needs, a deteriorating infrastructure, a declining standers of living. To what extent these problems will be resolved or get worse in the next decade remains to be seen.
The point now is not that we are in irreversible decline. The point is simply that one of the major changes in the world with ramifications for business in general and our need of self-esteem in particular is that we are now operating in a context of constantly escalating challenge. The challenge is to our creativity, flexibility, speed of repetitiveness ability to manage change, ability to think outside the square, ability to get the best out of people. Economically, the challenge is to our innovativeness and behind that, to our management ability, psychologically, the challenge is to our self-esteem.
The increasing demands on individual at every of a business enterprise, not just at the top but throughout the system for self-management, personal responsibility, self-direction, a big level of consciousness and a commitments to innovation and contribution as top priorities.
The ranks of middle management have been radically thinned, next merely as a cost cutting strategy but because computers have taken over the task of relaying information throughout the system, making their role more widely. Knowledge is more widely disseminated and freely available than ever before, making it much easier for people to operate at higher level of consciousness in their work and consequently to be more productive.
New managerchallenged to find new definitions of their roles. Their need now is to disengage feelings of self worth from trditina forms of sttus or from the prformace of particular task and to nas it instead on their abilty to think to lern to master new eays of functinion to repond apportitely to change, From trhe boardroom to the fatory floor, wrok is undstood more and more clearly as an expression of thought. As e
