Through the organizational looking glass: you can't plan tomorrow's organizations with today's assumptions

It's hard to imagine what our industrial society would be like if, for instance, there were no factories. How would things get produced, how would business survive? But are we, in fact, an industrial society? Are factories going to be the prime production place for a society that is conserving energy and doesn't need to travel to work because the silicon chip makes it more efficient to work at home? Who knows what the impact of energy conservation and women in the work force will be on future organizations? One thing we can be sure of, this author writes, is that whatever tomorrow brings, today's assumptions probably cannot account for it. We are, he asserts, entering a period of discontinuous change where the assumptions we have been working with as a society and in organizations are no longer necessarily true. He discusses three assumptions he sees fading--what causes efficiency, what work is, and what value organizational hierarchy has--and then gives some clues as to what our new assumptions might be. Regardless of what our assumptions actually are, however, our organizations and society will require leaders willing to take enormous risks and try unproved ways to cope with them.