The Rise of the Cooperative Economy, cont.
The Dissolution of Management
Obviously, it is necessary for people who produce the more valuable
"products" to be paid, so that they can continue to create these products. Or
is it all that obvious? We are at a very strange stage in the evolution of
civilization, one which marks the fact that Capitalism in and of itself
incomplete. The simple truth is that until fairly recently, the person who
created anything (and especially anything intangible) has seldom been
compensated for their work to the same degree as those people who package the
products are. Certainly this is true of such fields as commercial art,
literature and programming, to name just a few. Until the rise of stock
options as vehicles for wealth, most programmers were paid wages that were a
very small proportion of the total profits made from the software that they
created. The people that create the artwork for such products are even now
seldom compensated for the creation of essentially unique, high quality
material.
Conversely, the people who manage the companies that employ these artists
and developers typically make a much higher share of the profit than those who
create the product, sometimes orders of magnitude more when stock
appropriation is taken into account. The reason for this disparity is not at
all obvious, and is something of an indictment of capitalism. The actions of
any given artist or programmer may make or break a given product, yet the
responsibility for a company showing a profit rests directly with the upper
level management.
Or so the theory goes. In practice, the management chain is essentially a
conduit for passing information within the organization, and all too
frequently when a breakdown occurs at some level within the organization it is
not the managers who bear the brunt, but the very creators of the products in
the first place. As such, the nature of management has changed so that a
manager is supposedly the one providing the "vision" of the group, division,
or company itself.
One consequence, however, of the rise of the Internet is that it makes
possible a number of features that largely threaten the role of managers.
- Communication between teams of creatives (whether artistic or heuristic)
is readily facilitated with e-mail, newsgroups, and increasingly direct
video conferencing, meaning that the role of the manager is communicator is
decreased.
- The increasing tendency of companies to place much of their internal
information on intranets means that the manager's role as the disseminator
of information is likewise diminished.
- When a team has a known schedule and can readily see the progress of
various members of the team of creators, it is in the best interest of the
team as a whole to guarantee that work is distributed to better handle the
schedules, which is yet another domain that has traditionally been a part of
the manager's purview.
- A significant amount of the work that a manager does is to abstract and
consolidate the progress of the team for more senior managers. If one of the
project team members essentially takes on the role of being a liaison with
other teams (essentially the voice for the team, which was at one time the
primary role of managers but which is increasingly forgotten in the
corporate sphere) then this communication venue can be accomplished again
through technology.
- Finally, a manager is responsible for the tasks of hiring personnel to
fill positions and disciplining or firing those individuals who are either
not competent or who violate rules or laws of the corporation. Again, this
is a role that in this day and age is increasingly handled by the team that
the individual will work with, since they will often have a far better
understanding of both the requirements that the team needs and (especially
in the technical sphere) may be able to guarantee that the individual has
the technical competency to handle the job, something many managers are
ill-equipped to judge.
Of course, you can effectively argue that once you eliminate the team
manager, it is a short step to eliminating that manager's manager, and on up
the chain. At that point, a company becomes effectively a number of creative
cells, along with an administrative team that maintains information about the
company and compensates the team members. Ironically, that administrative team
does not necessarily need to be a part of the same company -- outsourcing
Human Relations is becoming a very popular business model, as such a function
is essentially a data management service that is largely independent of the
product that the creative teams build.
This trend is very real, and works to contravene the enormous concentration
of wealth in the hands of the upper echelon of management. It also creates a
business model very much at odds with the hierarchical blueprint that make up
most corporations today. By breaking the production into small, manageable
cellular teams, production becomes focused on building modular solutions that
may be used by other teams. Moreover, because projects evolve over time, the
constituency of a team may itself change in a fluid fashion, perhaps to the
extent that at the end of a project there are no original team members
left.
A consequence of this is that the corporation itself ultimately ceases to
exist as anything other than a virtual entity. Obviously, this holds true
principally in those venues that are largely driven by computers in some form
or fashion and additionally have little need for highly specialized plant
infrastructure (a refinery isn't going to go virtual, as a good
counter-example). Already you can see this in action in the production of
Hollywood films. Most of the talent involved is hired on an ad hoc basis from
production to production, from the companies that handle the initial casting
and set production to the film crews to the post-production and special
effects houses. Once a film is in distribution the companies that created the
movie move onto other projects, and the actual management of the film from
there on out falls into the hands of accounting firms.
The software industry itself is poised to undergo the same kind of
metamorphosis, as it is a field that lends itself especially well to this same
organization. Teams are brought together (perhaps through common agents, about
which more later) to design architectures, which are then handed off to other
teams (or companies, although the distinction is largely lost here) which
build or integrate the components, which are then handed off to still other
teams to handle the maintenance and technical support for the products thus
produced. In some cases the teams are themselves incorporated bodies which
effectively nucleate the talent -- keep groups of people together and
distribute the money made from their role in the transaction between them --
while in other cases the teams are assembled on an ad hoc basis from
independent developers or creatives.
One effect of this is that large software companies that have traditionally
played in the space of producing complex integrated systems will likely
disappear, or at least mutate into the role in this industry that the studios
hold in the film industry -- they will become brokers of services. This is in
fact a direct consequence of moving into the net services model: large
programming divisions with extensive management infrastructures simply cannot
respond fast enough to the needs for specific products or code, something
which will become even more of an issue as XML moves into the forefront of
delivery as a universal application medium. Instead, corporations such as
Microsoft or Sun will likely increasingly act as brokers bringing these
virtual corporations together to handle specific service requirements for
their customers.
Incidentally, the managers that are increasingly disenfranchised from their
traditional roles won't be hurting for work (if they're savvy). Much of what
mid- to upper-echelon managers do anymore is essentially acting as brokers
anyway, trying to match the capabilities in their divisions with the needs of
either the corporation or the corporation's clients. In the cellular model, on
the other hand, managers act as brokers, buying and selling the services of
smaller virtual companies to meet specific needs.
Other managers will move into the position of agents (either with an agency
or independent) who manage the careers of a number of high profile developers,
artists, or other creatives for a percentage of their profits. In this way you
can expect a particular skilled programmer or talented artist to have an agent
in much the same way as entertainers and sports figures do now. It is likely
that this will end up differing from the current head-hunter model, which is
heading toward extinction with the rise of online job banks and similar
resources.
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