Meet the New Boss (Pynchon's THEY or The Firm is Dead)

[alice wellintown]

After reading Henry Adams, young P penned his first novel, V.. The
coal power and gun power and the forces invisible that had replaced
the Virgin's power, though not her Unity, inform V. and GR. But the
Firm has fallen. As Murphey's Law, more apt than the Law of
Deminishing return or the Law of Yaw (that which prevented the father
of America's "space program from putting Churchill and the Queen of
the Moo--the death kingdom), teaches, and as GR often preaches, THEY
can not be defeated by a counter-force or a sick crew or a fumbling
foursome of super crooks guided by the historical or parodic rock man,
Juthro Tull, but must fall from an inertia that only GOD, not Newton
with his pair of Blake's deviders or Nobodaddy with his compass, can
Fathom.

Perhaps the New Boss and the new McLuhans, who are busy building a
global village on Tesla's web and predicting a utopian future are the
stuff of young novelists, those who read the complete works of Philip
K. Dick, Blackberry their MS to net consumers, and know little of the
history of labor--Pynchon's major concern, arguable, I guess, but
confirmed by his masterpiece AGTD--and technology, but Pynchon's work
on the history of the forces that developed circa 1900, in America,
and the cultural roots of those American forces (M&D), and, yes, even
his little mean detective parody about the link network and the
plastic woody surf girl, all rising from on pile of ashes named Henry
Adams, will find audiences long after the assualt on the romance is no
longer in vogue. There is nothing magikal in _A Fine Balance_, only
the magic of the prose. It's a beautiful heart-rending book. Mistry
does what Pynchon can't do; he writes a realist novel to rivel
Rushdie's _Midnight Children_, but Romance, Meta-Historical-Romance
will rise and ride again.


The End of Management
Corporate bureaucracy is becoming obsolete. Why managers should act
like venture capitalists

British economist Ronald Coase laid out the basic logic of the managed
corporation in his 1937 work, "The Nature of the Firm." He argued
corporations were necessary because of what he called "transaction
costs." It was simply too complicated and too costly to search for and
find the right worker at the right moment for any given task, or to
search for supplies, or to renegotiate prices, police performance and
protect trade secrets in an open marketplace. The corporation might
not be as good at allocating labor and capital as the marketplace; it
made up for those weaknesses by reducing transaction costs.

Mr. Coase received his Nobel Prize in 1991—the very dawn of the
Internet age. Since then, the ability of human beings on different
continents and with vastly different skills and interests to work
together and coordinate complex tasks has taken quantum leaps.
Complicated enterprises, like maintaining Wikipedia or building a
Linux operating system, now can be accomplished with little or no
corporate management structure at all.

That's led some utopians, like Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams,
authors of the book "Wikinomics," to predict the rise of "mass
collaboration" as the new form of economic organization. They believe
corporate hierarchies will disappear, as individuals are empowered to
work together in creating "a new era, perhaps even a golden one, on
par with the Italian renaissance or the rise of Athenian democracy."

That's heady stuff, and almost certainly exaggerated. Even the most
starry-eyed techno-enthusiasts have a hard time imagining, say, a
Boeing 787 built by "mass collaboration." Still, the trends here are
big and undeniable. Change is rapidly accelerating. Transaction costs
are rapidly diminishing. And as a result, everything we learned in the
last century about managing large corporations is in need of a serious
rethink. We have both a need and an opportunity to devise a new form
of economic organization, and a new science of management, that can
deal with the breakneck realities of 21st century change.

—Adapted from "The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management"
by Alan Murray.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704476104575439723695579664.html