Strategy for the Workplace Revolution

...Corporations are beginning to share with their employees and unions confidential data bearing on earnings, future prospects, planning, and even top-secret elements of business strategy...

...The influence of unions, both negative and positive, gets surprisingly short shrift as well...

...The informating process sets knowledge and authority on a collision course," Zuboffwrites...

...What kind of impact, for example, has the new technology had on the public sector...

...There is one consolation we can derive from Zuboff's failure to accord these developments detailed attention in her present a dmirable book...

...Learning would be recognized as the heart of productive activity and not considered time away from the job...

...Among middle managers, in particular, worries about the erosion of status if their subordinates were perceived as being truly their equals in understanding the computerized control systems manifested themselves with special intensity at management meetings...

...At the outset the system, dubbed dialog, proved a humanizing instrument that enriched the flow of ideas by bringing into the mix contributors whose thoughts would normally not have been tapped, and by eliminating from the decision-making process prejudices based on personality or position...

...The demise of an informal communications network at a huge drug company is perhaps Zuboff's most disheartening illustration of the way frozen managerial concepts can obstruct the imaginative unleashing of the new technology...

...Let no reader be turned aside by the profundity of the challenges Zuboff confronts or the incomprehensibility (to most of us) of the technological marvels reshaping the workplace...

...Under one scenario— the one that her research indicates corresponds much too depressingly to the mainstream of current practice—industrial intelligence would be lodged in the smart machine at the expense of human capacity for critical judgment...

...Nevertheless, she stresses the urgent need for this reordering...

...The goal was to foster what Zuboff calls "intellective skills" that would enable operators and supervisors to cooperate as equals in interpreting data and in testing hypotheses when problems developed...

...Zuboff sets the stage by tuning in on a lugubrious discussion among a halfdozen employees of one of the country's largest pulp mills, which is in the early phases of a $200 million conversion from manually regulated operations to microprocessor control...

...The link had been supplied by the company's installation, at substantial expense, of an in-house telecommunication conferencing system...

...She also points to the danger that in the absence of a collégial spirit, the ability today to create a "Big Brother" atmosphere of universal surveillance inside every factory or office invites the use of contaminating defensive techniques by those who feel themselves under scrutiny...

...Better than any scholar before her, she has illuminated the inescapable choices that must be made and the intractable obstacles that must be overcome if the computer-based information technology now transforming every aspect of work is to fulfill its still only dimly perceived potential for transforming society itself as fundamentally as the Industrial Revolution did two centuries ago...

...Every element of technological redesign at the pulp mill was geared to diminishing the amount of human involvement in operating decisions...

...The result, as she envisages it, would be to make most office and factory jobs increasingly isolated and devoid of meaning, prompting workers to intensify their In Coming Issues 'The Interim Balance in Israel" by Eliahu Salpeter "A Watchdog for British Television" by Norman Gelb "France's Father Figure" by Janice Valls-Russell "In for a Penny, Out for a Pound" by George P. Brockway search for avenues of escape through drugs, apathy or conflict...

...The spur toward joint decision-making in areas once the exclusive province of management has come in part from the dislocative effect inside the workplace of advanced technology, and far more from the savage pressures exerted on many employers by import competition, deregulation and the struggle to keep their enterprises alive...

...A younger member of the management team noted bluntly that apprehensiveness and jealousy were increasingly noticeable among his colleagues as they found the plant's technology lending the workers more and more of the qualities of operational managers...

...The depth of their despair moves Zuboff to declare that there is a world to be lost or gained, depending on the decisions we make about how knowledge and authority are to be distributed in the workplace...

...Zuboffs findings here—coupled with others derived from observing operations in a global bank, in the back offices of an insurance company processing dental claims, in an industrial corporation issuing stock transfer certificates, and in the service unit of a telephone company—lead her to conclude that corporate organization requires revisions as radical as those embodied in the technology itself...

...Every element of the work process would become less rigid and more dynamic as the present division between managers and workers yields to a new pattern of career progression...

...Managers came to regard it as a sort of counterculture that subverted respect for authority, and their venomous hostility quickly nullified dialog's worth as an outlet for resourcefulness and creativity...

...Zuboff is fully aware of the magnitude of the revolution in attitudes that must occur if the "informated" organization is to become a reality...

...Ironically, the operations chiefs, engineers and training directors who proudly told Zuboff of the primacy they assigned to squeezing out personnel and centralizing decision-making found it not at all inconsistent to end their explanations by saying that a secondary benefit of the smart machine was its power to "free up more of the operator's time for problem-solving...

...She does not pretend that all workers are either equipped or eager to take on the responsibilities and risks of a reordering of the workplace...

...many, it seems, equate flexibility of function and assignment with loss of personal security and breathing space for self-expression...

...The guiding principle was to take "the human interface" out of the process and streamline the hierarchy at the top to achieve maximum concentration of control, analysis and planning...

...Worker representatives are gaining seats on corporate boards of directors, and employee stock ownership plans and profit-sharing are further blurring the traditional lines of demarcation between management and labor...

...The comments of these pioneer voyagers from our familiar industrial orbit to the drastically altered one we are entering read like a21st-century version of a Studs Terkel study at its best...

...The biggest problem we have is ourselves," lamented the top plant manager at one such session—an apparently unconscious paraphrase of Pogo's classic comment, "We have met the enemy, and they is us...

...In closing, she cites the following admonition from one of the pulp mill workers she encountered: "If you don't let people grow and develop and make more decisions, it's a waste of human life—a waste of human potential...

...Even more ironically, a similar reluctance on the part of managers to countenance any narrowing of the distance separating chiefs from Indians soon became the norm in an ultramodem pulp mill built by the same giant paper company, despite an initial corporate determination to achieve high levels of employee involvement and commitment through emphasis on worker teams and a pay-f or-skills approach to compensation...

...We are left in the dark as to whether the dead hand of bureaucracy in such highly automated operations as those run by the Pentagon and the Social Security Administration has imposed more suffocating constraints than exist in profit-oriented enterprises, or whether just the opposite is the case...

...A brand new work force had been recruited, with hiring preference given to youngsters who would bring to an environment saturated with electronic data good educational backgrounds and a flexibility unencumbered by orthodox work habits formed in conventional plants...

...That would entail nothing less than the conversion of corporations into learning communities, with the electronic data base as their central core...

...Accordingly, Zuboff calls for the fashioning of innovative career ladders and reward systems at every level...

...Perhaps inevitably, given the sweep of the topic, In the Age of the Smart Machine leaves a number of important questions unanswered...

...An unparalleled corporate expenditure on training notwithstanding, many operators felt they had been denied the right kind of training—the kind that would carry them beyond basics to a sophisticated understanding of the "whys" of the automated equipment...

...The alternative scenario that Zuboff outlines—and clearly prefers—calls for top management to recognize that if today's possibilities are to be fully exploited, corporate resources have to be directed toward developing a labor force able to exercise independent judgment...

...Shesees managers as captives of a complex interplay of impulses and pressures more than as movers along a calculated path of self-protection...

...Raskin Former chief labor correspondent, New York "Times" On rare occasions we encounter a book that analyzes a pivotal social problem with such freshness, incisiveness and literary grace that we feel ourselves in the presence of greatness...

...Shemay devote her superb intellective skills to examining them in a future volume...

...But by the fourth year, Zuboff reports, it was obvious that the plant leadership had underestimated the tenacity with which traditional features of corporate organization would frustrate their efforts to secure a maximum return on the company's investment in the ultimate in state-of-the-art technology...

...That is not because she thinks the present difficulties in human and institutional relationships are the product of some grand design concocted by a ruling elite to ensure the perpetuation of its own power...

...People would be classified as colleagues and co-learners, jointly exploring and inventing, rather than as bosses and the bossed...

...All members would be encouraged to acquire as much information as their temperaments and talents permit, without regard to their place in the pecking order, and would be given the freedom of access they need to contribute to the expansion of valueenhancing knowledge...

...Itwas designed by its architects to create a "universal mind" that would span time and distance in blissful disregard of established disciplinary limits and chains of command...

...The workers were anticipating a technology that would do everything by itself, rendering their painfully acquired skills worthless and relegating those few of them who would continue on the payroll to the role of babysitter to the black box...

...The first three years at the new mill were marked by progress toward meeting the objectives of a highly automated facility through effective teamwork...

...Using the technology to its full potential means using the man to his full potential...

...Yet good as it is, even better are the vividly expressed insights she has culled from five years of interviews obtained by gaining the trust— indeed, almost getting inside the skin— of workers, managers, engineers, systems analysts, and others in a diverse range of blue-collar and white-collar enterprises...

...Zuboff rightly notes that the majority of these experiments have focused on a limited reshuffling of power at the shop level...

...Some of the author's own writing borders on the poetic...

...No specific budget item to cover training was ever incorporated in the meticulous planning that went into the $200 million outlay for the mill's conversion...

...Bringing about these changes in a command structure traditionally organized along paramilitary lines of encrusted authority is no easy task, as readily becomes apparent from the examples Zuboff cites...

...Although the desideratum would seem to be the second option, the context makes it plain that such is not the intent of an officialdom that appreciates the extent to which computer control has made knowledge the key to power...

...Yet there are other encouraging trends...

...They attributed this to the managers' fear of losing their knowledge edge...

...This network had enabled chemists, statisticians, research and development managers, and computer specialists to engage in what amounted to stream-ofconsciousness exchanges on a spectrum of concerns affecting the business, ranging from the development and testing of new pharmaceuticals to organizational issues...

...A new vocabulary would have to be introduced into the workplace too...

...This means endowing workers with new skills and knowledge that will add value to products and services while making their jobs more stimulating and rewarding...

...But most disappointing of all—and hardest to comprehend in the light of Zuboff's emphasis on democratizing the workplace—is the cursory treatment she gives to the modifications in established industrial command structures that are already being made in scores of companies, large and small, under rubrics like employee involvement, quality of worklife and labor-management participation teams...

...The computer is turned into a battleground—to the detriment of the data base, and of the warriors on both sides...

...An accolade of that sort belongs to this seminal work by Shoshana Zuboff, a youthful associate professor at the Harvard Business School...

...Surrounding the machine with smart workers undermines those boundaries and introduces a new ambiguity into the rationale for managerial authority...

...Never was there any definition of what problems the handful of remaining operators would be expected to solve, much less how they could solve them if they were systematically excluded from any understanding of the machine's functioning...

...From her vantage point as a trusted observer not only at these big pulp and paper mills but at other enterprises probing the opportunities opened up by breakthroughs in microelectronics, telecommunications, software engineering and computer science, Zuboff provides a fascinating account of how disgruntled employees can outwit the machine or deprive its designers of needed information...

...In the pulp mill, for instance, the plant manager asks his ranking associates: "Are we all going to be working for a smart machine or will we have smart people around the machine...

...But the very frankness the system was intended to foster proved its Achilles heel...

...They have not been allowed to get in the way of an enchantingly clear presentation...

...Intheabsenceof astrategy to synthesize their force, neither can emerge a clear winner but neither can emerge unscathed...

...Dominance over the smart machine safeguards the boundaries between those who command and those who are to obey...