Do you agree?
“The Computer is a moron” so said Peter Drucker one of the great business thinkers of the last 100 years.
Drucker was interested in people who worked with their minds. He saw the growth of specialized thinking in society and the need to have that thinking cooperate and interact with other specialized thinking to drive real results and progress leading to exponential success for all. Said another way, Drucker saw that the “boss” no longer held all the intellectual capital in a company. Where once a small elite was able to control most of the thinking and the rest “manufactured,” Drucker realized there were now many people in any organization who knew more about discrete subjects than their bosses did. The trick he said was to bring them all together; have them add value to each other and the results would be better than what was achieved through hoarding information or trying to centralize it in one person.
Clearly, he foresaw and understood the power of distributed thinking, collaborative thinking and all of the other buzz concepts we use so glibly in our computer centric environment, long before the Internet, extranets, team sites and Web tools.
And here is the challenge. I hear about how this or that collaborative tool “isn’t working”; how an intranet application isn’t cutting it; “technology isn’t robust enough”; how we haven’t invested enough in new systems to share work and ideas……
What would Drucker say????????? Probably this:
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
- BF Skinner
– that’s men — in the non-sexist/non gender sense…………Our business is built to thrive on collaboration; on building on ideas; on the power of added value and on the energy generated by an excited and motivated group of thinkers who all approach a problem with different solutions and possibilities.
Sure computers help. Sure, they make it more efficient. But if we don’t have intent to share and don’t make the effort to collaborate and don’t understand the need for added value thinking, the Computer, I am afraid is merely a moron…….
Your view?
The computer is, and will always be only as useful and smart as the people who use it, create on it and interact with it. In the end it is a spectacular facilitator, a group leader that brings together similar ideas and opens a forum for discussion and discovery around those ideas.
To Peter’s comments on the hording of information at the leadership level – I would say that the computer becomes the new great equalizer. Much like the printing press became a liberation of the growing middle class against those who held the knowledge base, the computer allows the great masses of today to be an equal player in the cyber public square.
By Definition a moron is “A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to 12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive.”
Thus I must disagree.
Not only is it wrong to define the computer by a term that is outdated and irrelevant in today’s blurred world of equal economic opportunities and blended social boundaries, but also to suggest a comparison to the human being with said definition.
We are vastly superior to computers, but primitive in our abilities to fully grasp the capability of the human mind and the potential that lies within.