The geeks in question are those at 538, which is both the number of electoral votes and a relatively new political website run by Nate Silver. Silver was the subject of a highly laudatory New York Times article this week, and he deserved it. Not only were his final presidential popular vote predictions highly accurate (predictions of 52.3 percent for Obama vs. 52.4 actual, and 46.2 predicted for McCain vs. 46.3 actual), he predicted that Obama would beat McCain as early as last March. And while some Congressional elections are still not resolved, it appears that his predictions are going to be very accurate there as well; he correctly predicted all the resolved races in the Senate, for example.

Silver has, I believe, discovered a good method for political prediction. You start with polls, which are now both frequent and widely-dispersed across the land. You take a bunch of them, correct for biases of various types (e.g., consistent lean right or left, or pollsters that don't call mobile phones), and then run a Monte Carlo simulation on the outcome to see what the probabilities and confidence intervals are. As you can see if you look on the website, it results in a massive amount of data, but it seems to work.

The Iowa presidential prediction market did well too in the end, but had some crazy blips for McCain in late April and May. At the end it forecast Obama's popular vote almost perfectly (52.5 predicted vs. 52.4 actual), but was a bit high for McCain (47.9 predicted vs. 46.2 actual). Even if it were as accurate as 538, the prediction market is probably not well-suited to dealing with electoral votes for President or state votes for Congress. That's just too many things for people to bet on, and it would undoubtedly confuse bettors.

Although the Iowa market as done very well over the years, it's subject to the mass hysteria that we are seeing in financial markets right now. Charles Mackay didn't call it the "madness of crowds" for nothing. I can't really remember back that far, but I suspect in late April and May there was a lot of media speculation that McCain--already the presumptive nominee--was going to jump all over whoever the exhausted Democratic candidate happened to be. And Iowa bettors bought that logic, at least for a few days. The behavior of these bettors shows that the Iowa markets violate a key principle of Jim Surowiecki's in The Wisdom of Crowds: that the predictors are independent of each other.

The 538 approach is another approach to crowd wisdom--it's an average of polls with a lot of statistical massage thrown in. Averaging polls even without the quant manipulation can be pretty accurate--see the predictions, for example, in Pollyvote.com or RealClearPolitics.com. The aren't quite as accurate as 538, but they don't exhibit the fluctuations of the Iowa market.

One of the most interesting questions about all this may be: what's next? Nate Silver did great work in baseball analytics, developing the PECOTA system (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) that's now a part of the Baseball Prospectus offering. Then he brought analytics to political polls. What new data-intensive domains remain to be conquered--by him or some other geek?

The fact is that we vote or take other actions for a wide variety of reasons other than simple economic interest. Joe the Plumber, for example, could get a tax cut from Obama, but he's voting for McCain. The usual rule of thumb that wealthy people vote Republican is breaking down, at least in this election--Warren Buffett is only the most prominent example. If you want experimental evidence that people vote for reasons other than selfishness, see the article in today's New York Times on the other criteria people employ.

What is the implication of this for business and the economy? It's just another nail in the coffin of traditional economics, in which rational self-interest is the only motivation that's considered. I agree with David Brooks that the current economic crisis will drive a move toward behavioral economics. The combination of economics, psychology, and sociology will prove much more capable of explaining and predicting financial behavior than traditional economics ever did.

I am grateful, I suppose, to University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler for introducing actual human behavior to the discipline of economics. I am told that despite the acclaim he's received (and despite the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman), behavioral economics still doesn't have much prestige in universities compared to the rational expectations practitioners. And as a sociologist, I think I can say with confidence that sociologists and psychologists have believed that human behavior--sometimes rational, sometimes not--was always an important factor in economic decisions. Our mistake was in leaving the economy to the economists.

In addition to Thaler, one economist who has seen the behavioral writing on the wall is Robert Shiller of Yale. His understanding of behavioral economics and finance was a contributing factor, I am sure, to his prediction of the bursting of the housing bubble, which I wrote about last week.

Someone who didn't see that writing is Gary Gorton, a colleague of Shiller's at Yale who advised AIG on its disastrous exposure to credit default swaps. A Wall Street Journal (reprinted in The Australian) yesterday described Gorton's extensive work with AIG, and concluded with Gorton's observation that, "There doesn't seem to be a fundamental reason why" AIG's customers panicked. Gee, it seems fairly obvious to me. Gorton should perhaps have substituted a couple of courses in behavioral science for his traditional economics curriculum. If there was ever a better story about how traditional economic models can bring down a company and perhaps an economy, I haven't read it.

What we need now is a behavioral understanding of economic risk--at both the individual and institutional levels. What is it that leads people to want to buy and sell, whether rationally or irrationality? When investors panic, what can calm them down? Under what circumstances will people divest assets even when it hurts them and the overall economic system? Until we know these sorts of things, economics will be relatively useless in difficult financial times.

MORE FROM HARVARD BUSINESS:

• Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature Is at Odds With Economics -- and Why It Matters, by Peter Ubel (forthcoming book)
• In Praise of Irrational Exuberance: A Conversation with William Sahlman (HBR article)
• Managers and Their Not-So Rational Decisions (Case Study) 
  

And some futurists got things spectacularly wrong. Remember, for example, Kevin Hassett and James K. Glassman, who wrote the book Dow 36,000 in 1999? Only a few more declines like those of last week, and they'll be off by a factor of 10. With such economic perspicacity, perhaps they should be working for the McCain and Bush economic teams. Wait, this just in -- according to an article in Monday's NY Times, that's exactly what they're doing. As Monty Python used to repeat, "Say no more..."

And how about Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, authors in 1997 of The Long Boom? This article, first published in Wired magazine and then expanded into a 1999 book (with a third author, Joel Hyatt), argued that things were just going to keep getting better and better. With information technology and the Internet, and the expansion of democratic capitalism, how could the economy do anything but grow? Well, I suppose it could also shrink.

I think that people should be held accountable for their predictions. One hopes they will be embarrassed enough to refrain from wasting our time and trees on future predictions. Maybe we should construct a giant prediction market, and force futurists to buy options on their predictions coming true.

I suppose it's useful for futurists to be provocative, but we should recognize that the economy is too complex and interconnected for anybody to really know what's going to happen with it. Economists don't have good models that reflect all the complexity, so they are just guessing like anyone else. Those that don't employ data are even worse -- there is nothing to constrain them at all.

Because the economy is highly interconnected these days, the swings that do happen often turn out to be violent. Today there's a 900-point upswing, tomorrow probably a 900-point downswing -- and that's just the Dow. It's probably safe to predict dramatic change -- we just don't know the direction. Futurists don't typically predict small change anyway, because it wouldn't be interesting to read about. But economists do -- their predictions are frequently aggregated and compared, so anyone whose predictions stand out gets beaten down. Other than Roubini, who doesn't issue numeric forecasts, I don't know of any who predicted how truly awful this year's economy would be.

Of course, it's not just economic experts that have a poor record of prediction. Philip Tetlock's research on political experts (summarized well in a Louis Menand review in the New Yorker) suggests that they also have a very poor track record. If you want accuracy, better stick to history.

For example, the old U.S. economy wasn't very environmentally sustainable. The good news about our current predicament is that the U.S. generally emits substantially less carbon into the atmosphere when it's in recession. So maybe we shouldn't come out of it until we figure out how to stop this pattern.

Our old economy was based heavily on consumption by--of course--consumers. Economists are saying that consumer spending is all that has saved our economic bacon over the past couple of decades, and now we've cut back. The good news about this is that consumers have been spending their way into severe hock, so stopping that overspending is positive.  Consumers have even resisted spending their economic stimulus checks. We need to save more to pay off our credit balances, finance our retirements, and send our kids to college. The bad news, of course, if that consumers don't spend we don't reinvigorate economic growth. So how can we stoke a consumer-driven economy and save at the same time?

We can't. It's no accident that China and Japan, for example, have been both producer-driven economies and nations of savers. We have to slowly shift back to being a producer-driven economy. It will be difficult and painful, but we have to spend less and produce more goods and services that other economies around the world want to buy. We also need to replace these other economies as investors in our own economy.

This probably means that the U.S. government needs to identify some key industries that it will nurture as the potential big exporters of the future. There used to be many objections to this sort of "industrial policy," but perhaps now that much of our financial system has been nationalized, such interventions will seem relatively mild. We're already investing in the automobile industry, for example, although I'm not sure that's our best bet for future exports. Tom Friedman is probably correct in saying (in Hot, Flat, and Crowded) that environmental technologies would be one of the best possible industrial policy investments for the U.S.

Another attribute of the consumer-driven economy we've built is that we have generally taken the proceeds of our productivity in--you guessed it--increased consumption. This is unlike our European cousins, who have cashed in productivity for leisure. Americans work some of the longest hours in the world, and we don't even have enough time to watch the cool flat-screen TVs we've bought. My guess is that we'd all be happier and more relaxed if we started trading increased productivity for increased time on the beach.

There are many other aspects of our new economic house that need to be renovated, but that would take a book, not a blog post. There need to be more regulation, greater investment in human capital, increased transparency and understandability, better health care at a lower price to the society, and so forth. None of these transitions will be easy. I don't envy the members of the new Council of Economic Advisers!

1999 the British think-tanker Charles Leadbeater published the book Living on Thin Air. It was both an appealing notion and a scary one: that we no longer have to produce anything but ideas. And that was even before Web 2.0--a platform for everyone to share their ideas, opinions, favorite tunes, and relationship statuses with each other. It was all a lot of fun, but I occasionally wondered whether it was really good for economic productivity.

Now all this fervent typing feels like we drank too much grain alcohol punch at a party last night. In the cold light of a morning-after economic crisis, one questions whether social media can really be the basis of a solid economy. Will people really have time to do all this friending if they fear for their livelihoods? Will we have time for Second Life when we have to take a second job?

I am not suggesting that we will be returning to the Dark Ages, or that there isn't some value in Web 2.0. We'll still have friends, and it will still make sense to write on their walls on occasion. Networks are important, and they contribute to economic life as well as social life. Even over-employed workers will still produce some user-generated content. But it seems to me that many of the activities, business models, and assumptions behind social media are a bit fluffy, and that fluffiness is going to be difficult to maintain in the post-bubble environment we now find ourselves in.

Instead of finding more ways for us to all yap at each other, in this more sober economy we may want to emphasize other priorities. What new products and services will make for better, healthier lives and relationships? How can companies improve their performance? How can teenagers improve their math and science skills, instead of their texting skills?

The generation that went through the Great Depression seemed to be imprinted with a permanent desire to work hard, save money, and live in an economically conservative fashion. Of course, I'm not arguing for that. But it wouldn't be a bad outcome if the current crisis led to a more diligent, industrious economic climate. Chatting and socializing are important things, but they're not the only things.

What we owe Mike for most is his relentless focus on business processes and their radical improvement. The only next big thing that he was really interested in was how organizations can improve how they do their work. In Isaiah Berlin's taxonomy, he was clearly a hedgehog--he knew one thing really well, and that thing was his lens on almost every aspect of business.

Mike was trained as an electrical and computer engineer at MIT, and then became a professor. I don't know much about his life and work there, but I wouldn't be surprised if he focused on the process of compiler design--or some other process-oriented topic--at that time. When I met him in 1983, he was well into a process-focused perspective on "office automation." His perspective was that it didn't make sense to use office automaton tools--word processing, copiers, etc.--to support existing office procedures. Instead, he argued, the procedures should be redesigned to take advantage of the new technologies. This message, of course, recurred throughout his career.

Mike and I were working together at the beginning of "reengineering." We found some PRISM sponsors, including IBM, Mutual Benefit Life, and Hewlett-Packard, that had dramatically improved their business processes through the use of IT. We parted ways shortly thereafter, and started competing to get some key ideas on paper. Jim Short and I beat Mike by a few weeks to publish the first article on the topic. Mike, however, wrote a much more attention-getting piece in Harvard Business Review, and thereafter he was known as the reengineering guru. The same pattern prevailed in books--I wrote the first one (Process Innovation), but Mike and Jim Champy penned the blockbuster tome Reengineering the Corporation.

Both Mike's writing and his speaking were bombastic and revolutionary in tone. I wasn't always happy about how the ideas came out, but I was happy that he got the attention of managers and businesses. From Mike I learned that how you present the ideas is just as important--if not more so--than the quality of the ideas and the research behind them.

Mike could be cranky, arrogant, and stubborn, but he was always worth the trouble to work with. He never lacked--in 1-to-1 interactions or large conferences--for jokes, interesting stories, and distinctive perspectives on people and events. He never gave a boring presentation. Even though he stuck with reengineering and business processes for several decades, he always had new and interesting things to say and write about them.

Mike Hammer the man was just as interesting as Mike Hammer the guru. No one was more conversant with cutting-edge business ideas and technologies, but he also maintained a fierce and old-fashioned loyalty to his family and his religion. He had all the latest computers and networks, but he never touched a lightswitch on the Sabbath. He could speak with CEOs around the world, but he preferred the company of his family any day.

Mike was sufficiently prolific that it will probably take companies many years to absorb and implement all of his ideas. And radical process change is difficult no matter whose methods you follow. But without the enthusiasm and the impetus he provided, reengineering will be even harder without Mike Hammer.

Also of interest: Michael Hammer: A Tribute to the Guru of Operations

What's the evidence that the problem was somewhat analytical in origin? Let me count the ways:

• Banks and mortgage companies use analytics to make automated or semi-automated decisions about mortgage loans. Various industry experts have told me that many firms continued to make subprime loans even though a close analysis of the data would have suggested that chargeoff rates were climbing for such loans. The companies simply didn't monitor their analytical models closely enough.

• Saul Hansell in a New York Times blog argues that Wall Street quants "lied to their computers" in their analytical models. He states that they included more years of history in their trading models for mortgage-backed securities than was warranted in order to make them look less risky. Quoting Gregg Berman of RiskMetrics, Hansell also states that traders knowingly traded mortgage-backed securities even when the risk of the securities being traded wasn't accurately assessed by available metrics.

• There seems to have been a general problem in financial analytics with the transparency and explicitness of assumptions behind quantitative models. Many mortgage-oriented models were implicitly based on the assumption that housing prices would continue to rise. Credit default models were based on the assumption of continued liquidity in credit markets. Neither, of course, have turned out to be valid assumptions for the current period.

• I've heard several suggestions that some of the hedge funds that are having difficulty now used me-too trading and valuation models. The quant analysts involved either moved from one fund to another--taking their models and assumptions with them--or they reverse-engineered the models based on what they could learn through their social networks.

• It's also clear that risk analytics are not what they should be. AIG almost fell because of its inability to price and predict credit defaults; Moody's, S&P, and Fitch were clearly unable to assess the risk of mortgage-backed securities and attach accurate credit ratings to them. The 1987 stock market crash was caused in part by a similar inability to assess the risk of portfolio insurance, as Richard Bookstaber describes in the book A Demon of Our Own Design.

There are undoubtedly more analytical problems behind the current crisis. Of course, we can't only blame the quants. I've also heard stories of analysts telling executives that they needed to hedge mortgage portfolios, and they didn't act on the advice. We also don't know who was responsible for violating the implicit or explicit assumptions behind quantitative models.

Going forward, however, financial services organizations need to radically change their analytical focus. They need to incorporate "model management"--the systematic capturing and monitoring of analytical models--into their businesses. They need to be much more explicit and transparent about the assumptions behind models. They--and their regulators--need to be skeptical about the ability to model and manage risk in extraordinary circumstances. And financial firm executives need to learn much more about the models that are running their businesses.

Naseem Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan argues that there are some events that are impossible to model or predict. It appears lately that there are more black swans in financial markets than white ones. Our analytical approaches and philosophies must be adjusted to accommodate them.

They have, of course, certain obvious things in common: the billions of citizens, the growth of a huge middle class, and the global prominence of key industries (manufacturing and high-tech in China, manufacturing and IT services in India). I don't doubt that both countries will be major players in the current and future economy. Both are undeniably exciting places to visit and observe.

Of course, there are also constraints in each country's rise. Can China triumph without democracy? Certainly its government has liberalized with regard to the economy, but not much yet on citizens' rights. The "protest zones" at the Beijing Olympics--in which nobody was actually allowed to protest, and many would-be protesters were arrested--is yet more evidence that capitalism and fairly open communications do not equate to democracy. Yet one need only glance at the skyline of Shanghai or visit a manufacturer in Shenzhen to see that this is a country that knows how to get things done.

In India, one sometimes feels that a benevolent dictatorship (much more benevolent than that of China) would do the country some good. It's quite a democratic country, but it seems difficult at times for leaders to stop arguing and get things done. The kerfluffle over the new Tata Motors plant in Singur, West Bengal, is a good example. Tata CEO Rajan Tata planned to build a tiny new car, the Nano, in the city of Singur near Calcutta in West Bengal. I haven't been there, but I gather the area could use as much economic development as it can get. Yet local officials, ostensibly fearing that farmers would lose their land, held up the deal to build the plant for months. The situation is still unfolding.

Of course we have lots of political arguments in the U.S., and at times they have retarded our economic development (in the area of providing decent health care for our citizens, for example, and the burden it imposes on economic growth). Somehow we have been able to achieve a high level of economic success in spite of our chaotic approach to governance. I hope that India will be able to do the same. The fate of over a billion people may depend on it.

What I did was work, pretty much all the time. I did research interviews, wrote reports and chapters, answered emails, talked on the phone, blah, blah, blah. OK, I have a "vacation home" on Cape Cod, but it has all the comforts of work (broadband, wireless network, 2 phone lines, fax/scanner/printer), so it has become just another place to bang away on the keyboard and keypad. OK, I took some walks on the beach with my family, saw a few baseball games, and had a few margaritas looking out over the ocean, but very few days passed without some work taking place.

But I come neither to praise my summer vacation nor to bury it. I don't feel tanned, rested, and ready as summer draws to a close, but I don't feel exhausted either. I'd rather have worked less, but I hate to be bored on the beach. My wife thinks that our summer vacation was wasted, but I'm just not sure what to think. I neither want to say something regretful like, "I really screwed up my summer," nor something macho like, "In his spare time, he enjoys overworking" (borrowed from Jennifer Chayes, director of the Microsoft Research New England lab).

There was too much work, but it was 100% self-inflicted. There was too much work, but it was work that I liked--most of it, anyway. There was too much work, but every individual project was worth doing, both financially and intellectually. There was too much work, but I hardly ever had to go into the office. There was too much work, but I wore shorts and sandals almost every day. So was there really too much work? Maybe I should be grateful just to have work!

I wonder how many other people feel the same way. As a tenured academic, I can pretty much take as much vacation as I want. But since I like what I do and can use the money and the fame, I keep doing more of it. I suspect that this is also true at the growing number of companies that don't monitor vacation time closely (see this article about IBM, for example, or this one about Netflix), and for the growing number of free agents in our economy.

What's your take on this topic? How much work did you do this summer? Did you take a vacation? Are you as ambivalent about too much summer work as I seem to be?

Larry and I both think that this trend has both positive and negative aspects, but is nonetheless somewhat inevitable. It's clear that sources of intellectual authority -- from encyclopedias to editors -- don't matter online as much as they used to in print, and that this democratization is spreading to realms other than Internet opinions.

But my question for today is whether this trend will lead to new business models for traditional knowledge-based industries and businesses. There's a lot of talk, for example, about the spread of public knowledge in medicine, and how it's changing the role of the physician. I'll grant that online knowledge has probably affected millions of doctor-patient interactions in the examination room and the hospital. I'm not sure how much doctors like it, but that horse is out of the barn, and it ain't going back in.

However, you still can't prescribe your own drugs (unless you leave the US) or make your own referrals. You can't sign yourself up for an appendectomy if your online browsing has convinced you that you need one. Most doctors won't even give you an email address so that you can tell them what you think you have and ask for drugs or other treatments.

So I'm wondering when that particular industry is going to offer some new business models that take the widespread availability of knowledge into account.

Just as I hardly ever visit a bank teller today, when will we make it easy to visit the doctor only for annual checkups? Which medical provider will acknowledge that the line between medical professional and amateur has begun to blur, and offer products and services that take advantage of the blurring?

One would think it would be a good business idea, for example, for a health insurer to offer online consultations with a doctor or nurse practitioner. You tell them your symptoms and what you think you have, and they confirm (or dispute) your self-diagnosis. Of course, it's possible to lie online about your symptoms, but you can do that in the doctor's office too. Some might object that we'll over-medicate ourselves, but don't we do that already? And since you only get about 7 minutes on average of face-to-face time with your doc, it's not as if we are giving up an intimate, in-depth relationship. No muss, no fuss, no bricks-and-mortar, and the insurance company gets by very cheaply.

There are some emergent ways to bypass knowledgeable professionals in some other fields. If you want to, you can create your own legal documents, and I find TurboTax easier than hiring an accountant to do my taxes. It's probably time that other professions, like medicine, acknowledged that they don't have all the knowledge to themselves.

This year, of course, the Summer Olympics are in China for the first time, which adds a frisson of excitement. However, television viewing of the Olympics has declined over the past several years (in part because of time zone issues), and I know of no one who is actually going to Beijing to see them. My kids don't seem excited about them at all, and they confirmed that it's not a subject of their conversations or Facebook wall postings. In the 60s and 70s when I watched, the Olympics were the only game in town, but now we've got many other diversions--I've got ten cable channels broadcasting sports every day. In general, one gets the sense that the Olympics are rapidly becoming yesterday's news--and although Chinese officials suggest that there will be 4 billion viewers worldwide, I doubt that many of us in the US will be fully engaged.

What can the Olympics--and NBC, which paid $894 million for the rights to broadcast them in the US--do to regain the attention and eyeballs of the US viewing public? Here are a few ideas:

Human drama gets attention. Give it to us "up close and personal." Which athlete rose from poverty? Who can't give it their all because they're thinking about their ailing mother? The media covering the Olympics need to make the athletes seem three-dimensional, (whether they really are or not). Sports Illustrated did a nice job of this in its Michael Phelps article.

Lists and rankings get attention. Give us a running count as to which countries have the most medals, which athletes have won the most golds, etc. Even some predictive modeling of who is likely to win what event would be appreciated, and would help us schedule our viewing.

Ethnocentrism gets attention. NBC and MSNBC should clearly identify the events in which Americans have a shot at winning. We (at least some of us) are not unhappy that China has emerged as a major Olympic competitor, but aside from Yao Ming, we don't know their athletes, and we don't want to watch them win everything.

Multiple media get attention. NBC and other Olympic broadcasters should be using as many media as possible to snatch eyeballs--blogs, social media, web, print, even movie theatres. If the latter can broadcast live opera, why not the Olympics in wide-screen glory?

Enemies get attention. One of the reasons we used to watch so avidly is that we didn't want the USSR to get ahead of us--in the space race, the Cold War, or the Olympic medal competition. Now that we don't have an enemy to speak of, who can we root against? Obviously Al Qaeda won't be fielding a team.

Real time live images get attention. The fact that Beijing is roughly 12 hours different from us Easterners in time zones is a bit of a drag. Not much can be done about it except to stage the contests we are most likely to care about (i.e., those in which Americans are likely to do well) at hours when we are likely to be watching.

Victory and defeat both get attention. ABC's Wide World of Sports used to know that both the "thrill of victory" and the "agony of defeat" were equally compelling. Sure, we love the winners, but tell us more about losers too. For an example, check out this MSNBC story about how gymnastics star Morgan Hamm was unable to perform in the Olympics because of a bad ankle. It's the end of his career, he says. Tell us more!

Preserving my attention gets attention. The Olympics are really complicated: ten thousand, five hundred athletes; 302 events; 28 sports. I need something to help me figure out where to devote my attention. How about an online assistant that would ask me what my interests are, what teams I follow, when I have time to watch--that would then recommend some events for me to tune into?

Of course, NBC and other media do many of these things, but they need to try harder. Otherwise, the Olympics will face a long slide downward in popularity. And if no one's watching, the athletes may begin to feel that they're not worth the trouble.

Read more on the Olympics:

• How Olympics Branding is Shaping China
• The 3 Levels of Branding at Beijing
  

One was with a couple of smart managers from a Canadian bank, who argue that in order to deal with the challenges of customer analytics, they need people who understand math and statistics, marketing, and softer research techniques such as ethnography and competitive intelligence. "We need people who are both artists and scientists," one commented.

The other was a CIO of a quick service restaurant chain. His interdisciplinary approach involves computer science and neuroscience; he uses the two fields to study what information people pay attention to and act on. He feels that many information systems fail because they don't address how the human mind processes information.

Interdisciplinary approaches are clearly taking over science, and they need to take over business as well. We won't be able to overcome the challenges of the next several decades unless we're all able to approach problems from a variety of perspectives.

One of the reasons we aren't as interdisciplinary in business as we should be is our business schools, which persist in trying to slot students, faculty, courses, and research into single-discipline slots. Of course, some schools are worse than others in this regard. One university where I formerly taught refused, by order of the dean, to count publications outside of the faculty member's formal discipline toward promotion and tenure decisions. Babson isn't like that, which is one of the reasons why I hang my mortar board there.

But business schools can't do it all. After you get your degree from one, whole fields of study will rise and fall. People who want to be interdisciplinary will have to read and pursue knowledge on their own--which is, in itself, an endangered behavior.

The rise of interdisciplinary thinking does make me feel somewhat smug in terms of the advice I've given my children. When my oldest son went off to college, I told him I had three words for him (three times as good as the "plastics" career advice that Benjamin Braddock received in "The Graduate"). The three were statistics, neuroscience, and Mandarin (Chinese language). Of course, he totally ignored my advice, and took up film and social theory. At least, I suppose, he was being interdisciplinary.

That got me to wondering whether we would see other yearnings for the past, and whether the next big thing in business can ever involve the past. There seems to be a slight rise in wishing for a less digital past; and several articles and books on that topic, including Nick Carr's piece in The Atlantic (about which I blogged a few weeks ago), and Maggie Jackson's book Distracted, are pretty popular. I wonder how far it will go.

What else (besides postcards) might come back? Non-working vacations are a possibility. Those organizations (such as IBM) that admirably allowed employees to simply take as much time away from their jobs as they needed are finding that employees often don't take enough time, or spend all their vacation time working. There's another Times article on this from last summer.

Another example of a possible return to the past involves re-regulation. The secular trend--particularly in the U.S., but to some degree globally as well--has been to remove regulation from many economic sectors. The result in the airline industry has been lots more passengers and lower fares, but (in case you hadn't noticed) really crappy service. In electrical energy, deregulation seems to have led to electricity shortages (in California) and higher prices (at least in Texas). In consumer finance, deregulation is at least partly to blame for the current credit crisis. People are beginning to talk about whether we need more regulation in each of these sectors. I am hardly an expert on the economics of regulation, but it seems that it might stage a comeback, particularly if we elect Barack Obama as President.

We also might see a return to some of the management practices of yesteryear. Every once in a while I think that I should have been born when my parents were, so I'd have a lifelong career with a single company, and that company would treat me in a paternalistic fashion and give me a nice pension (though I would probably find that very boring). But there are still companies that treat their employees quite well in almost a 1950s-like fashion (Toyota, SAS, Google, Wegmans, etc.), and they all tend to perform very well. Maybe treating your employees well is simply timeless.

I don't think we've ever seen a broad retreat from electronic behaviors, so I doubt that will be in the cards--postcards in the UK being an exception, perhaps. But other business ideas are more cyclical or even timeless, and I expect we will see some of them. What do you think? Is everything old new again?

Hmm...better tell all the world's managers, schools of management, management consultants, etc. The term "management" is apparently a synonym for "command and control," and we know that's bad. "Command and control" is top-down, mean and nasty, and headed for extinction; "sharing" is bottom-up, nice and friendly, and the wave of the future. Maybe the Yale School of Management, for example, should become the Yale School of Sharing.

OK, I have no problem with giving something a new name when you are adopting a new emphasis. I don't even have that much of a problem with the term "sharing," although it is somewhat reminiscent of kindergarten. However, I do have a problem with overly simplistic characterizations of knowledge management, and management more generally.

Let's talk about the more limited issue of defending knowledge management. As I said, I don't really care what you call it, but if your organization really cares about creating, distributing (I'm sorry--"sharing"), and applying knowledge, you need to manage it. The last time I checked, "management" of knowledge could include some relatively structured, "here's the knowledge we really need to do our jobs right" approaches, as well as some more emergent, Enterprise 2.0-oriented ones. If you only do the former, your knowledge workers will probably feel a bit stifled; if you only do the latter, things will probably feel a bit chaotic. If I'm a NASA astronaut, for example, and I'm sitting on the launch pad when something goes wrong, I'd rather have people looking for a solution in structured knowledge bases than mucking around in blogs and wikis.

But the broader issue is whether "management" is an outdated concept, or whether it's the same as "command and control." Frankly, I think those are nutty ideas. There may sometimes be a need for less directive approaches to management, as I argued with respect to knowledge workers in my book Thinking for a Living. But the right style of management, like the right approach to knowledge management, varies widely based on a number of factors--including the people being managed, the society in which you're managing, and the task at hand.

In fact, I think we should ban the term "command and control." It's simplistic shorthand for a stereotyped approach to management. The world of management is much more subtle and multi-faceted, and any synonyms for it should reflect that complexity.

I was a little envious. HBR in the US is a fine publication, but there are too many sources of management advice for any particular channel to dominate the business dialogue. Maybe things have become too fragmented. If you want to get an idea out into the world today, you've got to publish an HBR article, write a few blog posts about it, get a few business magazines to write about it, be interviewed by Maria Bartiromo, do a YouTube video, and perhaps even Twitter about it. Maybe publish your own book, as Dave Balter argues on this site in a recent "conversation starter" (yet another medium?).

These are the heavy burdens on business authors, but they also fall on business readers. If you were an assiduous student of new business ideas, to where would you devote your scarce attention today? How would you choose among the thousands of management-oriented blogs? If everyone is publishing their own books, which publishers do you trust? It's both the best and the worst of times for readers--there's a vast amount of content, but it's hard to know where to turn.

This content churn is perhaps responsible for the fact that nothing much seems to stand out among business ideas today. The business best-seller list, for example, is a little depressing. Good to Great is good, but is it that great? OK, The Tipping Point is a fun read, but does it really deserve to be on the list for 8 years? And don't get me started on Who Moved My Cheese. The reading public for business books isn't brain-dead; it's just dazed and confused from the fragmentation of content sources. And I'm not sure how Humpty-Dumpty will ever be put back together again. Maybe I should develop a taste for pierogis and stay in Poland.