Future Shock

Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn

Students must learn how to discard old ideas, how and when to replace them. They must, in short, learn how to learn

All the researches on learning," writes Harold D. Lasswell of Yale, "seem to confirm the view that 'energies' are bound in support of past learning, and that new energies are essential to unbind the old ..." At the neurological level, he continues, "Any established system appears to include exceedingly intricate arrangements of cell material, electrical charges and chemical elements.

They perform their roles in a vast, complexly organized "public drama" which is, in the words of sociologist Orrin Klapp, author of a fascinating book called Symbolic Leaders,largely a product of the new communications technology. This public drama, in which celebrities upstage and replace celebrities at an accelerating rate, has the effect, according to Klapp, of making leadership "more unstable than it would be otherwise

The difference in the personal tension of people in the top management positions and those of the same age who had reached a similar position in a more stable situation was marked." And Bennis declares: "Coping with rapid change, living in the temporary work systems, setting up (in quick-step time) meaningful relations – and then breaking them – all augur social strains and psychological tensions."

Yet there is another side of the coin, and he knows this, as well. For the turnover of relationships with formal organizational structures brings with it an increased turnover of informal organization and a faster through-put of people as well. Each change brings with it a need for new learning. He must learn the rules of the game. But the rules keep changing.

Men are willing to risk failure because they cannot believe they will ever starve. Thus says Charles Elwell, director of industrial relations for Hunt Foods: "Executives look at themselves as individual entrepreneurs who are selling their knowledge and skills

neat dialectical reversal

Thus John Gardner declares: "The loyalty of the professional man is to his profession and not to the organization that may house him at any given moment.

wishy-washy organization