The industrial age is over, and so is the information age.

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The industrial age is over, the information age is over too, we are comfortably in the knowledge age but most enterprises still operate like they are in the Industrial revolution. The industrial revolution is over a hundred years in the past. Frederick Winslow Taylor and his scientific management are obsolete. Taylor was wrong then and is still wrong today. He was an elitist academic who caused more harm to business and enterprise than is accepted. His ideas took the most sophisticated device known in our world, the human brain and reduced it to a dumb cog. Managing enterprises is not scientific as any successful leader will tell you. Managing processes can and should scientific but we have very limited information about what the formal method for managing enterprises should be. Any management “expert” today is probably another random liar selling snake oil. There are no experts in an area where each situation is completely different. Even previous experiences don’t matter because managing a widget factory and a consulting firm can never be the same no matter what the “experts” would like you to believe.

The information revolution really referred to the move from factory-punch-the-clock type thinking that information technology ended in the last decades of the 20th century. The concept of an information age portends the end of industrial age thinking. This also means the end of professionalism and the complete and utter debunking of experts. In a world with infinite information and equal access to all, there are no experts. We have infinite information because the barriers to entry for information creation are none existent. Anyone, anywhere, anytime can create information just like i am doing right now without having to get approval from anyone. Before the end of the decade we shall all have equal access to all the information available to everyone. Almost instant retrieval and effective presentation of that information will mean that we won’t need experts to advice us on obvious choices that we have to make. That is the knowledge age. Everyone given all the required information will always make the pragmatic decision. You can only imagine how productive and effective we would all be under these circumstances. This is the promise of our species.

Why are most enterprises including government still behaving like we are at the beginning of the 19th Century instead of the 20th Century? Because we were reared by people that had accepted the inevitability of a world with limited information. To convince older people that you can have more information than your expert is almost impossible because it sounds counter intuitive, but you can because it’s all information. That’s what is different between you and the expert, they have invested time in understanding the discipline, but that doesn’t matter any more because there is now an infinite supply of information because it is being created by everyone continuously and in real-time. What matters today is being able to use the tools for Fast information retrieval and presentation. The information age is over and the knowledge age will bring progress and advances that are unbelievable and unimaginable. That vision is hard to see when most people alive are uninformed and hopeless.