21st Century Business
The business climate today is
in a state of flux, evolving in many ways, but essentially from the forms familiar to
managers and workers during the Second Industrial Revolution into new ones. For sake of
convenience, I call the new environment the Information Age, and we work in the New
Digital Economy because the Internet has changed so much how we use computers and work.
This book is about what tasks both managers and workers in this period of transition from
one economic order to another are doing and need to do to be successful. The answer lies
largely in doing three things. First, managers have to perform many basic tasks of
management essentially unchanged from one decade to another. For example, managers still
have to run organizations that generate a profit. Second, both managers and workers need
to leverage technologies quickly and effectively and, in the process, adapt to the
consequences of such actions. You see this strategy already at work-using the Internet
for new channels of distribution of products and services-but the activities required
extend far beyond this new merger of computing and telecommunications. Third, most
managers and workers have to work effectively in companies (even government agencies) that
live in two worlds, that of the old Industrial Age and in the emerging Information Age.
This book is about how to
carry out these new requirements. In the early 1990s, an author of a book such as this
would have had to defend the notion that things were changing. Today, such an author finds
readers very familiar and accepting of the notion that things are changing, ofen very
rapidly.