people who don't understand the systems can dictate the market
the agencies always seemed to do that
then the microsofties allied with the agencies
just don't understand it
to me the model programmer the expert programmer the competent
programmer is the one who has control over everything
pity they leave organisations and everything gets left in stasis
they always seem to leave

blazerfivenine Dec 13 2003, 11:03 am show options
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From: blazerfiven... (AT) postmaster (DOT) co.uk (blazerfivenine) - Find messages
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Date: 13 Dec 2003 02:03:09 -0800
Local: Sat, Dec 13 2003 11:03 am
Subject: The Gentleman versus the Technologist
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The new industries that emerged after the railroad owed little
technologically to the steam engine or to the Industrial Revolution in
general. They were not its "children after the flesh" - but they were
its "children after the spirit". They were possible only because of
the mind-set that the Industrial Revolution had created and the skills
it had developed. This was a mind-set that accepted - indeed, eagerly
welcomed - invention and innovation.

It also created the social values that made possible the new
industries. Above all, it created the "technologist." Social and
financial successs long eluded the first major American technologist,
Eli Whitney, whose cotton gin, in 1793, was as central to the triumph
of the Industrial Revolution as the steam engine. But a generation
lateer the technologist - still self-taught - had become the American
folk hero and was both socially accepted and financially rewarded.
Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, may have been the first
example: Thomas Edison became the most prominent. In Europe the
"businessman" long remained a social inferior, but the university
trained engineer had my 1830 or 1840 become a respected
"professional".

By the 1850s England was losing its predominance and beginning to be
overtaken as an industrial ecomony, first by the United States and
then by Germany. It is generally accepted that neither economics nor
technology was the major reason. The main cause was social.
Economically, and especially financially, England remained the great
power until the First World War. Technologically it held its own
throughout the nineteenth century. Synthetic dye-stuffs, the first
products of the modern chemical industry, were invented in England,
and so was the steam turbine. But England did not accept the
technologist socially. He never became a "gentleman." The English
built first-rate engineering schools in India but almost none at home.
No other country so honored the "scientist" - and indeed, Britain
retained leadership in physics throught the nineteenth century, from
James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday to Ernest Rutherford. But the
technologist remained a "tradesman" (Dickens for instance showed open
contempt for the upstart ironmaster in his 1853 novel Bleak House.)

Nor did England develop the venture capitalist, who had the means and
the mentality to finance the unexpected and unproved. A French
invention, first portrayed in Balzacs monumental La Comedie humaine,
in the 1840s, the venture capitalist was institutionalized in the
United States by J.P. Morgan and, simultaneously, in Germany and Japan
by the universal bank. But England, although it invented and
developed the commercial bank to finance trade, had no institution to
finance industry until two German refugees S.G. Warburg and Henry
Grunfeld, started an entrepreneurial bank in London, just before the
Second World War.

Bribing the Knowledge Worker

What might be needed to prevent the United States becoming the England
of the twenty-first century? I am convinced that a drastic change in
the social mind-set is required - just just as leadership in the
industrial economy after the railroad required the drastic change from
"tradesman" to "technologist" or "engineer".

What we call the Information Revolution is actually a Knowledge
Revolution. What has made it possible to routinize processes is not
machinery; the computer is only the trigger. Software is the
reorganisation of traditional work, based on centuries of experience,
through the application of knowledge and especially of systematic,
logical analysis. The key is not electronics; it is cognitive
science. This means that the key to maintaining leadership in the
economy and the technology that are about to emerge is likely to be
the social position of knowledge professionalss and social acceptance
of their values. For them to remain traditional "employees" and be
treated as such would be tantamount to England's treating its
technologists as tradesmen - and likely to have similar consequences.

Today, however, we are trying to straddle the fence - to maintain the
traditional mind-set, in which capital is the key resource and the
financier is boss, while bribing knowledge workers to be content to
remain employees by giving them bonuses and stock options. But this,
if it can work at all, can work only as long as the emerging
industries enjoy a stock-market boom, as the Internet companies have
been doing. The next major industries are likely to behave far more
like traditional industries - that is, to grow slowly, painfully and
laboriously.

The early industries of the Industrial Revolution - cotton textiles,
iron, the railroads - were boom industries that created millionaires
overnight, like Balzac's venture bankers and like Dickens's
ironmaster, who in a few years grew from a lowly domestic servant into
a "captain of industry". The industries that emerged after 1830 also
created millionaires. But they took twenty years to do so, and it was
twenty years of hard work, of struggle, of disappointments and
failures, of thrift. This is likely to be true of the industries that
will emerge from now on. It is already true of biotechnology.

Bribing the knowledge workers on whom these industries depend will
therefore simply not work. The key knowledge workers in these
businesses will surely continue to expect to share financially in the
fruits of their labor. But the financial fruits are likely to take
much longer to ripen, if they ripen at all. And then, probably within
ten years or so, running a business with (short-term) "shareholder
value" as its first - if not its only - goal and justification will
have become counterproductive. Increasingly, performance in these new
knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the
institution so as to attract, hold, and motivate knowledge workers.
When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers'
greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by
satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and
social power. It will hyave to be done by turning them from
subordinates into fellow executives, and from employers, however well
paid, into partners.

(1999) Peter F Drucker
The Information Society - Beyond the Information Revolution
"Managing the next Society" 2002