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posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 25 2016, @04:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the er,-yeah,-maybe dept.

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Two of my favorites (warning: open access may be withdrawn at a future date) were: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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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @05:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @05:21AM (#418407)

    Fuh, Lili is pussy, it's dope.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday October 25 2016, @07:07AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday October 25 2016, @07:07AM (#418425) Journal

    (warning: open access may be withdrawn at a future date)

    So it is not actually open access, then, is it? It is just some corporate whore strutting down the tubes of the internet to seduce naive nerds with how cool they are, what with the "temporary" open access! "Yeah, we get it! Open Access! We're cool!" Until they are not, and the tightening tentacle of intellectual property wraps around your neck, tightening bit by bit, until you Google the "user" agreement, and realize it has been changed and you pray they do not alter it further. And then you realize, Google has done it, too. You expected no less of the tie ins to the defense establishment, MicroShaft and Appal, but for Google to take you down the primrose path, and not even say "thank you". You feel used, violated, almost ready to install BSD. Worst of all is the dawning realization that Stallman is right, he has always been right, and you have been a fool not to listen. Too late, newbie! Yes, it has been twenty five years that you have been in the arena, but you are still a newb. Oh, the shame! Oh, the humiliation! Oh, the Huge Manatees!

    Oh, by the way, investments will not save your sorry ass. We eat the financials first, when the apocalypse comes.
    (This One is for You, Marand! XX0X!)

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 25 2016, @11:02AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday October 25 2016, @11:02AM (#418468) Homepage Journal

    O'Reilly can kiss my entire ass. I won't touch their books since they went full on SJW (imported an SJW blocklist on Twitter and invited Randi Harper to speak at OSCon).

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by https on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:00PM

      by https (5248) on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:00PM (#418644) Journal

      Do you even register how fucking insane you appear? Here's a hint: very. I would forgive a casual observer for giving up and telling themselves, "smile, nod, and back away slowly." You're labouring under the delusion that there's an entire legion or two of evil miscreants under a single leadership that wants to take away all of your GOD GIVEN RIGHTS to be a jerk. Exhale. The truth is, if someone's being a jerk, an awful lot of disparate people are going to have identical reactions, which is why your delusion that they're acting as a unified group appears plausible to you.

      Please, either seek professional mental health services or stop being a jerk. Either way, SJWs will no longer be on your mind.

      --
      Offended and laughing about it.
      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @11:27PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @11:27PM (#418762)

        Pretending that there is no problem is just as dishonest as pretending the problem is omnipresent. It's no laughing matter when people accused of rape in many universities are punished without any actual due process and alleged victims are automatically believed. It's also disconcerting when many mainstream websites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) pretend they love free and open discourse (there's always a "but" attached, and it is often subjective and has nothing to do with the legality of the speech) and use subjective, draconian rules to censor certain speech; they may be legally allowed to do it, but that doesn't make it right. I like SoylentNews and its policy of basically never censoring anything, so I'd rather see 'jerks' running around than have these awful rules.

  • (Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday October 25 2016, @03:47PM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Tuesday October 25 2016, @03:47PM (#418585)

    I don't get it. Who designed, wrote, and maintains the programs that are the workers? This either doesn't make any sense at all, or I'm not smart enough to figure it out. The human developers are the ones grinding out the software, not managers.

    Now the other woman is just blowing smoke. Please, "the unintended consequences of all this were to undermine job creation in the United States" - bwahaha - the definite, purposed, and intentional consequence was to eliminate jobs in a carefully orchestrated process that unfolded over several decades.

    --
    (E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Kenny Blankenship on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:52AM

      by Kenny Blankenship (5712) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:52AM (#418808)

      I totally get it. I have several hundred programs which monitor and fix recurring issues. I designed and wrote them, so I was wearing my "worker hat" during that phase. However, that phase is a relatively short fraction of the program's lifetime. After that I put on my "manager hat" to make sure the programs don't break, go berserk, or become obsolete... a lot like managing hundreds of (stupid/single-minded) people.

      --
      Someday, even Killer Meteors must fail.