From Stowe Boyd’s blog: “The industrial influence in business management and theory is profound. In essence, for the past hundred years business has been objectified as a machine, divided into various components, like a clock or an electric generator. Components are composed of subcomponents, and so on, until you get down to nuts, bolts, and flywheels. People are — in the industrial scheme of things — gears in the machine, and their purpose is to perform a defined role in the assemblage.

This is the unexamined premise of how many businesses are ‘designed’ — to the extent that they have been consciously designed, instead of unconsciously shaped by decades of 19th and 20th century management dogma. First, the rise of assembly lines, vertical integration, and the rise of business processes. Then, the emergence of new communication technologies (telephones, email, web), that spawned the reengineering and knowledge management patterns of thinking about business, each with fatal …read on.”