ABSTRACT
Among the witticisms attributed to the former manager of the New York Yankees Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra is “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”1 This shrewd advice encourages us to be circumspect in what we write. Rather than make outright prophesies, we consider the future by revisiting the past. One person who has been more prescient than most about the future of technology is John Diebold (1926-2005). A graduate of Harvard Business School, where he earned a distinction, John Diebold was author of such best-selling books as Automation (written in 1952 when he was aged twenty-six and one year fresh out of Harvard), Making the Future Work (1964), and Managing Information: The Challenge and the Opportunity (1985).2 In an article published in 1965, Diebold described the “threshold of ‘ information revolution’ that will affect the practice of management in ways that our conventional notions of computers can only hint at.”3 To help pay for his studies, Diebold took a low-paying job in a consulting company (which no classmates wanted). Diebold later bought the company. With his first book, John Diebold is acknowledged to have originated many of the technological concepts that are now commonplace, and is acknowledged to have originated the word automation as it is used nowadays. John Diebold’s consulting company focused on helping organizations understand and appreciate the business and social benefits of information technology (IT).
