Business and Management

Many of our current dilemmas in the management of business and many other institutions in our societies result from a situation in which we have had, possibly, more radical transformations in the past fifty to a hundred years than in any comparable period in history. One major discontinuity in our own period, as Drucker ³² and others have underlined, originates with developments in science in the late nineteenth century—the extension, as earlier noted, of experimental and measurable ranges into the invisible sub-sensorial world of atomic, molecular and 'radiation' phenomena. The more direct application of many of these discoveries to the industrial process occurred during and after World War II, and marked the emergence of a new relationship between basic scientific research, technical development and socioindustrial use. The major tools, and change agents, of our present period—electronics, automatic control systems, and computers —emerge from this relation, plus the new 'software' tools of operations research, decision theory and systems analysis. A major accelerator of this discontinuity was, therefore, the 'organisation of the invention' of the innovative or change process in itself.