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The art and science of the possible

~ A celebration of non-zero sum thinking

The art and science of the possible

Tag Archives: Knowledge Economy

What does an “innovation economy” really mean?

22 Friday May 2015

Posted by lnedelescu in human capital, innovation, management, Organizational Development, society

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Agile, Economy, Independent judgement, Innovation, Knowledge Economy, Knowledge worker

Prosperity

We have entered the knowledge economy, but are only dismally realizing its tremendous potential for accelerating human progress and prosperity. While we acknowledge human talent as the chief resource of the 21st century, we fail to utilize the creative potential for a majority of the workforce. In fact, the portion of the employed workforce which utilizes independent judgement has remained stagnant for decades [see Nilofer Merchant]. Regarded from this angle, our state of the art economy is only marginally efficient at turning knowledge into innovation.  Progress is only achieved painstakingly and convolutedly. The lost opportunity cost is tremendous [see David Nordfords].

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Communism is dead. Long live (corporate) Communism!

05 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by lnedelescu in business, capitalism, future, human capital, knowledge, management, philosophy, society

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Tags

business, Charles Handy, Communism, Corporations, human capital, Knowledge Economy, Peter Drucker, Progress, Society, Talent

Communism

The sensible consensus is that communism became all but extinct with the end of the Cold War. I say it may be so, but the mindset that fueled it continues to live unhindered. Your next thought may be that I am referring to North Korea. But I have something much closer to home in mind: the U.S. corporate sector. Yes, you didn’t misread. I will dare to say that the mindset of the corporate sector in 2014 is eerily reminiscent of communist thinking.

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The True Capitalist Manifesto

29 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in capitalism, future, human capital, philosophy, society

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Capitalism, Communism, Harvard Business Review, Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx, Knowledge Economy, Manifesto, Umair Hague

Image

Picture the time in which Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto emerged. The Industrial Revolution, unraveling in full force, was very much based on a materialist world view. Since physical resources are limited it’s only normal that someone, Marx or otherwise, would have signaled that a zero sum race for wealth will make some extremely rich only at the expense of others. And indeed there was some truth to that, as exceedingly ambitious industrialists seemed to have no limit to their greed. There’s no leap of logic required to arrive at the “class warfare” idea aimed to right the inequities generated by a zero sum game world. Accumulation of things, cordially known as consumerism in our time, was also decried by communists as a sickness of the soul.

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What’s beyond the knowledge economy shouldn’t scare anyone

22 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in capitalism, complexity, Crisis, future, human capital, society, technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

automation, Buckminster Fuller, jobs, Knowledge Economy, Kurzweil, labor, Society, specialization, technological singularity

Image

The love-hate relationship of humanity with technology seems to be universal across ages. We love the benefits that technology brings, but hate it when it threatens our jobs, or forces us to learn new skills faster than our comfortable pace.

In the words of Clayton Christensen, one could say that technology is slowly disrupting human labor (and I include here knowledge work). The latest scare for humanity is the so called “technological singularity”, where artificial intelligence learns how to design improved versions of itself, and so exponentially surpasses human intelligence, leaving us humans well…irrelevant. Popular author Kurzweil predicts the year for this around 2045. Less extreme viewpoints still see automation as a major disruptive force to social order as even knowledge workers will be out of jobs in the next few decades. And so the fatalists wonder: how do we deal with the social implications of a few billion unemployed – will anarchy be the norm in 2045?

While the logical thread leading to a fatalist view of the future may seem sound, it is in fact plagued with serious flaws based in a misunderstanding of the differences between silicon and carbon-based intelligence.

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The mechanistic world view continues to be reinforced by Information Technology

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, management, society, technology

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Tags

Analytics, Big Data, business, creativity, Frederick Taylor, Humanity, Information Technology, Knowledge Economy, Machines vs. Humans, management, Manufacturing, Mechanistic Thinking, Process, Production, Research and Development, Workflow, World View

Image

This will be a very short blog post. I am not going to make an elaborate argument. Rather, I would like the “evidence” to speak for itself. My thesis is that Information Technology (IT) continues to proliferate mechanistic thinking in business, more than a century after Frederick Taylor fathered the science of workflow analysis and labor productivity in a manufacturing intensive economy. While we’ve since moved on to the knowledge economy, we have yet to abandon manufacturing thinking.

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