Market conditions are forcing us to make a break with managerial practices of the past.

Labour’s efficiency growth has been dominating productivity since the industrial revolution. Previously, investments in physical capital (such as roads) drove productivity.

The industrial revolution marked the moment when there was humongous growth of output per worker, without the corresponding investment in physical capital.

This has been driven by an era of industrial capitalism, characterised by the division of labour to enable specialisation and the routinisation of work tasks.

As the non-creative parts of tasks become disentangled from the creative parts, they can increasingly be made more efficient by applying standardised processes, semi-automation and eventually total automation.

These efficiency gains apply a selection pressure, driving further splitting of tasks into creative and non-creative parts.

In the modern era following the industrial revolution the creativity in business was done at the strategic management level of existing businesses or by entrepreneurs for new businesses.

An entrepreneur would discover a re-arrangement of tasks that enabled these efficiency protocols, and setup an organisation to exploit this discovery to undercut their competitors in the market, or to enable the birth of a new market that was previously economically inaccessible. E.g. Henry Ford inspired by the “dis-assembly” line in a slaughterhouse, setup an assembly line for automobile construction.

Managers hire non-creative labour to plug the holes in the process where creative and non-creative work are still coupled, or where an economically viable, totally automated solution for some non-creative work has not yet been found.

In the past, creatives were ignored if they had no power / authority. They head no means by which to enact their creations. Only those with financial backing and social status could bring their creations to life in broad markets, often employing labourers.

As technology has advanced, we continue to discover ever more efficient methodologies and build ever more powerful tools. This has led to reorganisations occurring and non-creative work vanishing at an astonishing rate.

A positive feedback loop has been kicked off. New efficiencies, lead to more efficently discovering new efficiencies.

Discovering and implementing efficiencies enables us to discover and implement meta-efficiencies.

As the discovery of efficiency protocols accelerates, non-creative labour is disappearing and new creative work is being created.

That being, the creative work of generating these efficiency protocols.

Labour is increasingly shifting to be the process of creatively disrupting existing labour.

Strategic management continues to be creative, but the growth in creativity is happening with the labourers; and management is struggling to adapt to this change.

To creatively generate efficiency protocols, a holistic overview of the whole system is required. Specialisation and tight focus hinders creativity. Generalism and holism drives creativity.

This contrasts sharply with the methodology of the division of labour that drove modern industrial capitalism.

The goal of [creatives] is not to execute. Rather, the goal is to learn and develop profound new business capabilities.

The managerial practices of the modern era are becoming increasingly defunct in our contemporary post-modern or metamodern society.

Organisations that employ modernist managerial practices will stifle the business innovation and employee growth required to compete in an increasingly creative market.

Adam Smith himself criticizes the division of labor, suggesting that it leads to the dulling of talent — that workers become ignorant and insular as their roles are confined to a few repetitive tasks. By contrast, generalist roles provide all the things that drive job satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

The future is owned by organisations that can employ new managerial practices designed to nurture creatives.

Organisations that can nurture holism within individuals.

Organisations that can have all as one, and one as all.

Organisations that can drive meta-efficiencies.