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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Fall 2016 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review contains 14 short essays from researchers and businesspeople on the transformative impact of 21st century digital technology (social media, Big Data, mobile, AI, robotics, IoT) on the practice of business management; it's part of a feature section called Frontiers which they intend to run on a regular basis.

Two of my favorites (warning: open access may be withdrawn at a future date) were:

Tim O'Reilly, tech book publisher, contrasting workers in Silicon Valley's customer facing businesses (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber, etc) with factory workers of the previous century:

If you think with a 20th century factory mindset, those workers spend their days grinding out products, just like their industrial forebears; only today, they are producing software rather than physical goods. If, instead, you step back and view these organizations with a 21st century mindset, you realize that a large part of the work of these companies — delivering search results, news and information, social network status updates, and relevant products for purchase — is performed by software programs and algorithms. These programs are the workers, and the human software developers who create them are their managers.

Rita Gunther McGrath, prof. at Columbia Business School, wrote on unintended consequences of technology and the emergence of novel "complex systems" (chaotic, subject to unpredictable destabilization) in the business world. She used the analogy of the introduction of shipping container technology 60 years ago:

Once it became possible to ship even low-value goods and make a profit, the rules of competition changed. Rather than being a relatively fixed commodity located in one physical place — the docks — labor could now be sourced from anywhere containers could be packed. And rather than employer and worker being tied to each other in one relatively enduring relationship, an army of outsourced and freelance workers came into play and redefined the dynamics between management and labor. The advent of shipping containers created global competition for jobs and transformed entire supply chains. As former Intel chairman and CEO Andy Grove lamented in 2010, the unintended consequences of all this were to undermine job creation in the United States, even as employment growth among U.S. trade partners in Asia skyrocketed.

BTW I just picked up my dead tree copy of the Fall issue of the Sloan Review; well worth it for $12.95 (there's a full complement of regular-length business articles in addition to the short Frontier essays). Look for the retro comic book graphic.

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