ABSTRACT
The typical large organization, such as a large business or a government agency, twenty years hence will have no more than half the levels of management of its counterpart today, and no more than a third the number of ‘managers’. In its structure, and in its management problems and concerns, it will bear little resemblance to the typical manufacturing company circa 1950, which our textbooks still consider the norm. Instead it is far more likely to resemble organizations to which neither the practising manager nor the student of management and administration pays much attention today: the hospital, the university, the symphony orchestra. For like them, the business, and increasingly the government agency as well, will be knowledge-based, and composed largely of specialists who direct and discipline their own performance through organized feedback from colleagues and customers. It will be an information-based organization.
