Technology makes the world a new place.

We know how to punish retailers and manufacturers that don't provide quality and value. But we're lousy at fighting effectively for what we really need - reliable insurance policies; affordable health care; safe, healthy food.

Earlier generations of machines decreased the complexity of tasks. In contrast, information technologies can increase the intellectual content of work at all levels. Work comes to depend on an ability to understand, respond to, manage, and create value from information.

Computer mediation seems to bathe action in a more conditional light: perhaps it happened; perhaps it didn't. Without the layeredrichness of direct sensory engagement, the symbolic medium seems thin, flat, and fragile.

Every century or so, fundamental changes in the nature of consumption create new demand patterns that existing enterprises can't meet.

If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamicsthat present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.

Authority is the spiritual dimension of power because it depends upon faith in a system of meaning that decrees the necessity of the hierarchical order and so provides for the unity of imperative control.