Corporate executives who pay serious attention to the human resource factor concur that it seems to be joining the list of endangered species. The human element is being squeezed out of global business enterprises by three developments. One is the preoccupation with rationalization, or restructuring, that seems to characterize contemporary management. A new breed of manager has evolved-the minimalist. In the United States a prime example is General Electric's CEO Jack Welch, who, in his first five years as CEO, downsized G.E. by one half, from 200,000 to 100,000 employees worldwide. The minimalists of the world are beginning to gobble up "anachronistic" companies, which they "turn around" by rationalizing their operations, starting with corporate staff and line workers.
The other developments contributing to the human resource dilemma are automation and cybernization. Machines seem to be taking over most of the work that humans once performed; computer-based expert systems and other decision support systems are even beginning to trespass in the domain of the middle manager. Cybernetics, the science of control and communication, has made possible the creation of control and communications systems that collect, organize, and evaluate data from around the globe and use these data to make decisions. Applied cybernetics, or information technology, has led to the development of computers that allow the manager to perform control and communication tasks in virtually zero time and at a fraction of the cost of merely ten years ago.
Human resource management is thus at a crossroads. Some fifteen years ago, in Global Reach) Barnet and Muller proposed that "the obsolescence of American labor must be seen as a part of a world problem. In the Global Factory [which is built by the World Managers] there is a steadily declining need for human hands." To the last phrase we might now add "and human brains."
- 1328 reads
