ABSTRACT
The typical large business twenty years hence will have fewer than half the levels of management of its counterpart today, and no more than a third the managers. Businesses, especially large ones, have little choice but to become information-based. Demographics, for one, demands the shift. One of America's largest defense contractors made this discovery when it asked what information its top corporate and operating managers needed to do their jobs. Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose. The information-based organization requires far more specialists overall than the command-and-control companies we are accustomed to. Information-based organizations need central operating work such as legal counsel, public relations, and labor relations as much as ever. Information-based organizations, in other words, require clear, simple, common objectives that translate into particular actions. Information responsibility to others is increasingly understood, especially in middle-sized companies. Bassoonists presumably neither want nor expect to be anything but bassoonists.
