DECODING THE NEW RULES
All these anti-centralist tendencies—in politics, in corporate or government organization, and in the economy itself (reinforced by parallel developments hi the media, in the distribution of computer power, in energy systems, and in many other fields)—are creating a wholly new society and making yesterday’s rules obsolete.
SMALL-WITHIN-BIG IS BEAUTIFUL!
Many other sections of the Second Wave social code are also being drastically rewritten as the Third Wave arrives. Thus Second Wave civilization’s obsessive emphasis on maximization is also under sharp attack. Never before have advocates of Bigger Is Better been so assailed by advocates of Small Is Beautiful. It was only in the 1970’s that a book with that title could have become an influential, worldwide best seller.
Everywhere we are seeing a dawning recognition that there are limits to the much-vaunted economies of scale and that many organizations have exceeded those limits. Corporations are now actively searching for ways to reduce the size of their work units. New technologies and the shift to services both sharply reduce the scale of operation. The traditional Second Wave factory or office, with thousands of people under a single roof, will be a rarity in the high-technology nations.
In Australia, when I asked the president of an auto company to describe the auto plant of the future, he spoke with. utter conviction, saying, “I would never, ever again build a plant like this one with seven thousand workers under the same roof. I would break it into small units—three hundred or four hundred in each. The new technologies now make this possible.” I have since heard similar sentiments from the presidents or chairmen of companies producing food and many other products.
Today, we are beginning to realize that neither big nor small is beautiful, but that appropriate scale, and the intelligent meshing of both big and small, is most beautiful of all. (This was something that E. F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful, knew better than some of his more avid followers. He once told friends that, had he lived in a world of small organizations, he would have written a book called Big Is Beautiful.)
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