Fireflies: The Concept of the Corporation Chapter 2

It was a short week and hot. Summer is here and with it came the fireflies. As you walk home, you can see them hovering near the shrubs. They will be here for 4 weeks, maybe 5. They like hot weather but will be driven off by the oven of July. Or they will have mated by then and retired to air-conditioned hovels in the earth to raise their kids.

Drucker has returned to planning, which is the great contradiction of his writings. He doesn’t like it in governments. He likes it in companies. He sees way in which management is starting to displace the market but he has yet made no comment about it. There are still enough market indicators guiding their decisions.

We are clearly at a cusp with this company, the start of the evening when the fireflies appear. General Motors already has the ethos that I will be tracing in the modern workplace. It already has much of the mechanism for gathering and using data –facts – that software will support. It is clearly all handled by hand at this point, and there are few companies with the resources to do that kind of work. We will see how they start to build that structure.