Three Things We Have To Do To Fix the 21st Century

Right about now, our organizations are working…in all the wrong ways. They’re solving yesterday’s problems, mostly, still. But those problems have already been solved. Yet today’s and tomorrow’s haven’t. They’re just getting bigger, spinning out of control, and so the future’s unravelling — or what’s left of it. What do I mean by that? Here are the three problems our creaking old Industrial Age organizations were built to solve, and did solve. Profit. We know how to build organizations to maximize profits. Profits hit record-shattering levels, and then earth-shattering ones. That doesn’t mean that every organization is profitable, but it does mean that maximizing profits is very much a solved problem. Efficiency, scale, reach, make it all look glamorous, perhaps. We know how to solve this problem — to death. Scale. We know how to build organizations at massive, and I mean massive scales. Think about how big some of the world’s biggest really are. They employ millions of people, and informally employ even more than that, as contractors and temps and so forth. We have incredibly complex systems of management for all this, from “matrix management,” to the sheer grunt work of modern day “Human Resources,” to the way poor old job-seekers have to send out billions of CVs just to get maybe a handful of interviews. The scale at which we work is colossal. Solved problem. <a href="https://eand.co/three-things-we-have-to-do-to-fix-the-21st-century-549dd8290366">Learn More</a>