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the right to make managerial decisions. Today, the managers are losing their monopoly on

decision-making.

More and more, says Professor Read of McGill, the "specialists do not fit neatly

together into a chain-of-command system" and "cannot wait for their expert advice to be

approved at a higher level." With no time for decisions to wend their leisurely way up and

down the hierarchy, "advisors" stop merely advising and begin to make decisions themselves.

Often they do this in direct consultation with the workers and ground-level technicians.

As a result, says Frank Metzger, director of personnel planning for International

Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, "You no longer have the strict allegiance to hierarchy.

You may have five or six different levels of the hierarchy represented in one meeting. You

try to forget about salary level and hierarchy, and organize to get the job done."

Such facts, according to Professor Read, "represent a staggering change in thinking,

action, and decision-making in organizations." Quite possibly, he declares, "the only truly

effective methods for preventing, or coping with, problems of coordination and

communication in our changing technology will be found in new arrangements of people and

tasks, in arrangements which sharply break with the bureaucratic tradition."

It will be a long time before the last bureaucratic hierarchy is obliterated. For

bureaucracies are well suited to tasks that require masses of moderately educated men to

perform routine operations, and, no doubt, some such operations will continue to be

performed by men in the future. Yet it is precisely such tasks that the computer and

automated equipment do far better than men. It is clear that in super-industrial society many

such tasks will be performed by great self-regulating systems of machines, doing away with

the need for bureaucratic organization. Far from fastening the grip of bureaucracy on

civilization more tightly than before, automation leads to its overthrow.

As machines take over routine tasks and the accelerative thrust increases the amount of

novelty in the environment, more and more of the energy of society (and its organizations)

must turn toward the solution of non-routine problems. This requires a degree of imagination

and creativity that bureaucracy, with its man-in-a-slot organization, its permanent structures,

and its hierarchies, is not well equipped to provide. Thus it is not surprising to find that

wherever organizations today are caught up in the stream of technological or social change,

wherever research and development is important, wherever men must cope with first-time

problems, the decline of bureaucratic forms is most pronounced. In these frontier

organizations a new system of human relations is springing up.

To live, organizations must cast off those bureaucratic practices that immobilize them,

making them less sensitive and less rapidly responsive to change. The result, according to

Joseph A. Raffaele, Professor of Economics at Drexel Institute of Technology, is that we are

moving toward a "working society of technical co-equals" in which the "line of demarcation

between the leader and the led has become fuzzy." Super-industrial Man, rather than

occupying a permanent, cleanly-defined slot and performing mindless routine tasks in

response to orders from above, finds increasingly that he must assume decision-making

responsibility—and must do so within a kaleidoscopically changing organization structure

built upon highly transient human relationships. Whatever else might be said, this is not the

old, familiar Weberian bureaucracy at which so many of our novelists and social critics are

still, belatedly, hurling their rusty javelins.

BEYOND BUREAUCRACY

If it was Max Weber who first defined bureaucracy and predicted its triumph, Warren Bennis

may go down in sociological textbooks as the man who first convincingly predicted its

demise and sketched the outlines of the organizations that are springing up to replace it. At

precisely the moment when the outcry against bureaucracy was reaching its peak of shrillness

on American campuses and elsewhere, Bennis, a social psychologist and professor of

industrial management, predicted flatly that "in the next twenty-five to fifty years" we will all

"participate in the end of bureaucracy." He urged us to begin looking "beyond bureaucracy."

Thus Bennis argues that "while various proponents of 'good human relations' have been

fighting bureaucracy on humanistic grounds and for Christian values, bureaucracy seems

most likely to founder on its inability to adapt to rapid change ...

"Bureaucracy," he says, "thrives in a highly competitive undifferentiated and stable

environment, such as the climate of its youth, the Industrial Revolution. A pyramidal

structure of authority, with power concentrated in the hands of a few ... was, and is, an

eminently suitable social arrangement for routinized tasks. However, the environment has

changed in just those ways which make the mechanism most problematic. Stability has

vanished."

Each age produces a form of organization appropriate to its own tempo. During the

long epoch of agricultural civilization, societies were marked by low transience. Delays in

communication and transportation slowed the rate at which information moved. The pace of

individual life was comparatively slow. And organizations were seldom called upon to make

what we would regard as high-speed decisions.

The age of industrialism brought a quickened tempo to both individual and

organizational life. Indeed, it was precisely for this reason that bureaucratic forms were

needed. For all that they seem lumbering and inefficient to us, they were, on the average,

capable of making better decisions faster than the loose and ramshackle organizations that

preceded them. With all the rules codified, with a set of fixed principles indicating how to

deal with various work problems, the flow of decisions could be accelerated to keep up with

the faster pace of life brought by industrialism.

Weber was keen enough to notice this, and he pointed out that "The extraordinary

increase in the speed by which public announcements, as well as economic and political facts

are transmitted exerts a steady and sharp pressure in the direction of speeding up the tempo of

administrative reaction ..." He was mistaken, however, when he said "The optimum of such

reaction time is normally attained only by a strictly bureaucratic organization." For it is now

clear that the acceleration of change has reached so rapid a pace that even bureaucracy can no

longer keep up. Information surges through society so rapidly, drastic changes in technology

come so quickly that newer, even more instantly responsive forms of organization must

characterize the future.

What, then, will be the characteristics of the organizations of super-industrial society?

"The key word," says Bennis, "will be 'temporary'; there will be adaptive, rapidly changing

temporary systems." Problems will be solved by task forces composed of "relative strangers

who represent a set of diverse professional skills."

Executives and managers in this system will function as coordinators between the

various transient work teams. They will be skilled in understanding the jargon of different

groups of specialists, and they will communicate across groups, translating and interpreting

the language of one into the language of another. People in this system will, according to

Bennis, "be differentiated not vertically, according to rank and role, but flexibly and

functionally, according to skill and professional training."

Because of the high rate of movement back and forth from one transient team to

another, he continues, "There will ... be a reduced commitment to work groups ... While skills

in human interaction will become more important, due to the growing needs for collaboration

in complex tasks, there will be a concomitant reduction in group cohesiveness ... People will