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Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If one does not begin to volunteer before one is forty or so, one will not volunteer when past sixty.
In a knowledge society we expect everyone to be a “success.” But this is clearly an impossibility.
Managing oneself is based two very opposite realities: workers are likely to outlive organizations, and the knowledge worker has mobility.
Japan’s success—and there is no precedent for it in history—very largely rested on organized immobility—
The emergence of the knowledge worker who both can and must manage himself or herself is transforming every society.
Tomorrow’s educated person will have to be prepared for life in a global world. It will be a “Westernized” world, but also increasingly a tribalized world.
Most, if not all, educated persons will practice their knowledge as members of an organization.
Intellectuals see the organization as a tool;
Managers see knowledge as a means to the end of organizational performances.
all knowledges, in the words of the great medieval philosopher Saint Bonaventura, lead equally to the truth.
Indeed, if this century proves anything, it is the futility of politics.
The British census of 1910 defined “lower middle class” as a household employing fewer than three servants.
The blue-collar worker in manufacturing industry and his union are going the way of the farmer.
For farmer and domestic servant, industrial work was an opportunity. It was in fact the first opportunity in social history to better oneself substantially without having to emigrate.
The new jobs require a good deal of formal education and the ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytical knowledge. They require a different approach to work and a different mind-set. Above all, they require a habit of continual learning.
with knowledge being universally accessible, there are no excuses for nonperformance.
Knowledge workers will be both “employees” who have a “boss” and “bosses” who have “employees.”
With the emergence of the knowledge society, we have become a society of organizations.
Increasingly, the true investment in the knowledge society is not in machines and tools. It is in the knowledge worker. Without it, the machines, no matter how advanced and sophisticated, are unproductive.
as a discipline, management is barely fifty years old.
The essence of management is to make knowledge productive. Management, in other words, is a social function. And in its practice, management is truly a “liberal art.”
Where community membership was seen as fate, organization membership is voluntary.
And all the social functions of the old communities, whether performed well or poorly (and most were performed very poorly, indeed), presupposed that the individual and the family would stay put.
This very mobility means that in the knowledge society, social challenges and social tasks multiply.
The majority answer goes back more than a hundred years, to the 1880s, when Bismarck’s Germany took the first faltering steps toward the welfare state. The answer: the problems of the social sector can, should, and must be solved by government.
The emergence of the society of organizations challenges the function of government.
As soon as knowledge became the key economic resource, the integration of the interests—and with it the integration of the pluralism of a modern polity—began to fall apart.
If the twentieth century was one of social transformations, the twenty-first century needs to be one of social and political innovations.
Alexis de Tocqueville, pointed out that revolutions do not demolish the prisons of the old regime; they enlarge them.
Innovation and entrepreneurship are thus needed in society as much as in the economy, in public-service institutions as much as in businesses.
What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady, and continual.
“Planning” as the term is commonly understood is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy.
Innovative opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.
In an entrepreneurial society individuals face a tremendous challenge, a challenge they need to exploit as an opportunity: the need for continual learning and relearning.
The correct assumption in an entrepreneurial society is that individuals will have to learn new things well after they have become adults—and maybe more than once.
The assumption from now on has to be that individuals on their own will have to find, determine, and develop a number of “careers” during their working lives.
Even in the most settled and stable societies people will be left behind in the shift to knowledge work.
There can be nationalism, but without citizenship, it is likely to degenerate from patriotism into chauvinism.
In order to be able to act in a rapidly changing and dangerous world, the postcapitalist polity must re-create citizenship.
Traditional communities, we have now learned, were held together far less by what their members had in common than by necessity, if not by coercion and fear.
Family is where they have to take you in, was a nineteenth-century saying.
The denominational diversity of American churches; the strong emphasis on local autonomy of states, counties, cities; and the community tradition of isolated frontier settlements all slowed down the politicization and centralization of social activities in the United States.
What the U.S. nonprofits do for their volunteers may well be just as important as what they do for the recipients of their services.
Historically, community was fate. In the postcapitalist society and polity, community has to become commitment.
In 1946, with the advent of the computer, information became the organizing principle of production. With this, a new basic civilization came into being.
control of information by government is no longer possible. Indeed, information is now transnational; like money, information has no “fatherland.”
We are already beginning to move the information to where the people are—outside the cities—in such work as the handling of credit cards, of engineering designs, of insurance policies and insurance claims, or of medical records.
“Bigger” will be “better” only if the task cannot be done otherwise.
For communication to be effective, there has to be both information and meaning. And meaning requires communion.
Increasingly, therefore, the question of the right size for a task will become a central one.
