[MUSIC] In this final segment, I'm going to offer you some concluding thoughts. Pulling together some of the themes that we've discussed over the entirety of this course. Take a look at this chart, you remember it from week number one. It was the the two images of what people think the future of management might be. On the left, we've got the, there's nothing new under the sun, it's the same as it ever was image, and on the right side, we've got this notion that the future management is going to be radically different. And I said it in week one, and I'm going to repeat it again, I don't actually believe in either of those particular themes. I believe that there is a third way. That the future of management is going to be some combination of what has always worked, and some combination of what is possible, made possible through technological and social change. So if you think about the various things we have talked about over the five weeks of this course, on the left-hand side, we've got that in traditional management model. We spent most of the time, really, talking about the various aspects of management that we can put under the broad heading of, of bureaucracy. And we also talked, of course, in the last, in the last few segments about the fact that the traditional model was large, traditional, limited liability companies that work was traditionally done, shall we say in an office, on a sort of a nine to five basis. And that the company used to take charge of our career. The alternative model, of course, we've talked in, a lot about the different principles of management from emergence to collective wisdom to intrinsic motivation to obliquity. We talked more recently now about the mix of different types of companies, a mixture of big companies, a mixture of smaller companies. More and more freelancers, more people working as virtual workers. Perhaps telecommuting rather than actually being in the office on a nine to five basis. We also talked about the fact that, that people are increasingly taking charge of their own careers, rather than waiting to be, as it were, assigned to jobs by a company. So, we've got the classical model, we've got kind of the newer model, and we've got these forces pulling us in both directions. That has been the theme throughout the course, and it plays itself out at every level of analysis, from near the higher level of the industry, to the company, to the business unit, down to the individual. If I were to try to summarize what we're saying here, I would put it down to two overall themes. And this really becomes both descriptive as well as prescriptive. On the left, we have the forces for stasis, the forces for, if you like, inertia. And an awful lot of that is about conformity to external norms. You know, what most companies do, what they continue to do, is to essentially follow the leader. They say to themselves, how are we going to work? We're going to work by benchmarking ourselves against other companies. We're going to figure out what is the safe, standard way of doing things by just simply following the crowd. On the right side, what we see is the, the companies that are taking kind of the path less, less often traveled, we're taking the path where we're trying something a little bit different. And of course, that takes enormous courage because almost by definition, the path less traveled is the path where we don't have a role model. We're not quite sure if it's going to work. We're taking a few risks along the way. And so when we see exciting companies trying innovative new ways of work, and when we seeing individuals being prepared to step up and try things little bit differently within their organizations, they are the ones who are actually making it, it possible for us to, to change things. I think I used this famous quote from George Bernard Shaw in the first week, but I'm not, I'm not embarrassed about using it again, because it's a, it's a beautiful quote. George Bernard Shaw said that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world. Whereas the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself, therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. So my kind of theme for this course, really, is about we need more unreasonable men or women, we need more unreasonable organizations who are prepared to challenge the traditional orthodoxies and norms by which work gets done. And it's only through those sort of individuals and those sort of organizations that we can really create the company of the future.
