Why The Future Of Technology Is Always More Human
Peter Drucker was the quintessential management visionary.” He was often decades ahead of his time, developing concepts like knowledge worker and management by objectives long before they were on anybody else’s radar. It was for good reason that the corporate elite hung on his every word as if they were supplicants getting an audience with an ancient oracle.
Yet when he first met Thomas J. Watson, IBM’s now legendary CEO, Drucker was somewhat taken aback. “He began talking about something called data processing,” Drucker recalled, “and it made absolutely no sense to me. I took it back and told my editor, and he said that Watson was a nut, and threw the interview away.”
We tend to think in linear terms and expect current trends to shape the future. Yet what we don’t see are the nascent ecosystems forming out of our field of vision. Things connect in nonlinear ways until some crucial link triggers a genuine inflection point. That has less to do with technology or economic trends and much more to do with how humans solve problems.
Electricity’s Productivity Problem
In 1882, just three years after his legendary development of his light bulb, Thomas Edison opened his Pearl Street Station, the first commercial electrical distribution plant in the United States. By…
