Marshall McLuhan

		The New Executive Role


Current concept of executive role is of one who maintains stability and 
order amidst chaos and change.  In fact, the executive is a person who 
diverts attention and resources from all change and innovations that 
threaten existing order.  The more timid and conservative the manager, 
the more he contributes to undermining the structure he seeks to defend.

Consider the case for a new University Library designed to serve students 
and faculty in the new electronic ENV.  The stocking of the library with 
millions of books and periodicals mixed with a few manuscript collections 
will be regarded as a bulwark against the unstructed and unclassified 
materials of the ENV. influx.  The vast majority of contemporary INFO. 
SERVICES and KN are neither printed nor verbal.  They are designs, 
models, processes, in actual use.  This is as true of the armed services 
and the espionage activities of governments and BIZ as it is of the 
audience research of politicians, entertainers, and educators.

"The true University of these days is a collection of books", said 
Carlyle, more than a century ago.  That was a radical remark when the ED 
process was still mainly oral.  The new INFO. ENV. of that time was the 
NEWSPAPER which Carlyle regarded with aversion.

This is a natural response of anybody entrenched in a craft that is 
confronted with a more potent rival.  Instead of anticipating the changes 
that will be brought about by the new technology, the entrenched 
individual or group concentrates on consolidating its position.  Such 
were the impregnable Maginot Line and the unsinkable Bismarck.  Today the 
Maginot Line, having been of greatest military disservice to the French 
in War II, is now for sale piece-meal to house- hunters.

Managers of the various establishments -- governmental, military, 
commercial, ED., have all experienced BREAKDOWN of their operations and a 
loss of goals.  Their immediate response is intensification of current 
procedures -- more and more efficiency.  This response hastens 
destructions.  The preserver is the destroyer.  These were the twin roles 
of Apollo, God of Wisdom.  The difference between him and modern 
management is that he could discriminate between what to scrap and what 
to renew.

In an age of instant and ubiquitous retrieval, the Library that 
duplicates or matches the printed resources of other libraries might be 
as misguided as present motor car manufacturers, who assume the 
permanence of big cities and highways in the JET and missile age.  The 
military establishment has been stymied by the overkill of the Atomic 
Bomb.  Publishers and Copywriters likewise are baffled by the "bypass" of 
Xerox.  In turn, Xerox will be retired by "home facsimile" publications, 
viz. TV.

The new executive role is to anticipate all effects by understanding 
causes.  Anticipation means programming the effects of innovation.  We 
have long passed the limits of automatic human adjustment to the effects 
of innovation.  The would-be preservers of present establishments are 
Luddites and Jeremiahs at best.  The new strategy -- decide in advance 
what social operations can be performed.

The innovation of anaesthesia has permitted the savaging of the human 
frame so that convalescence has become the principal form of disease.  
Such, for example, is the case of Urban Renewal.  Anaesthesia is 
performed by planning and publicity, while surgery is done by wreckers 
and building engineers.

Peter Drucker's recent book, The Age of Discontinuity, calls for a theory 
of organization to cope with change in the new world EC.  He is unable to 
perceive that the new ENV. of WORLD INFO. is bound to create discontuity 
by all-at-onceness while ending the regime of industrial hardware and 
classified markets and prices that went with the age of mass-production 
-- repeatable packages.

The unstructed and gradeless school of the EL INFO. ENV. succeeds to the 
BU and fragmented school based on classified INFO. of print technology.  
In the same way structured EC based on a money-oriented EC is succeeded 
by KN IND.  This revolution is long past but is still managed as if it 
were going to take place in the year 2001.  For the new executive it is 
the "noise" of total ENV that he must now convert into the program of his 
global theatre -- the world EC.
(1970-71)