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 Once new products took a long time to get into the mainstream. Now new ideas do - and that should change
Can any of you remember when buying yellow margarine was illegal? People younger than 40 may not, since you've gotten your Parkay whenever you felt like it, never knowing that things used to be different.
After it was invented in France in the 1860s and introduced to the United States in 1870, margarine seemed a threat to the American dairy farmer. Farmers' lobbying convinced the 1886 Congress to tax margarine to discourage its sale; by the 1930s yellow margarine was illegal in most states. The tax was lifted in 1950, and the ban on colored margarine in 1967. Margarine sales nearly doubled between 1950 and 1970.
What's interesting about this is that the agricultural age in the United States ended about the time margarine came on the scene. But not until fifty or sixty years later was yellow margarine finally legal for the consumer to buy and use. That sixty years is a common lag time, the time between what institutions sanction and what the society needs or wants.
That kind of lag time is going on now, of course. The oil, gas, and steel industries that drove the manufacturing days are no longer in ascendancy. Ours is increasingly a knowledge-based economy, and in such an economy, what's good for General Motors is still what's good for the USA, but what's good for Google and Yahoo may be better.
 Social commentators continue to talk of the "communication age," the "information age," all kinds of terms that say that we are, indeed, in a new era that has changed the way we work and live. Although such terms are in use, and the computer is now ubiquitous, most of us, and those in leadership positions, really don't understand the full magnitude of what this communication age is about. Like it or not, some of us are yet in a lag time from the manufacturing age.
If looking at the stars is really looking into the past because it takes millions of years for the light to reach the earth, looking at the skylines of Houston, the city that processed energy built, may be looking more at America's past than at its future.
Margarine is legal to buy now, but we're still practicing some clumsy and outdated habits in the way we manage people and the way our organizations are run. We aren't willing to accept changes that are valuable. We need to remind ourselves that the greatest resource of the communication age is human creativity.
In the agricultural age, land was the primary resource, and machine labor raised productivity. In the industrial age, capital and oil and gas drove our productive capacity. Now, at the dawning of the communication age, our primary resource is the human imagination.
Managers and leaders today, in every field, are coming to
grips with the human imagination as the potential source for
breaking the limits set by the manufacturing age. It will
be interesting, fifty years from now, to see what the yellow-margarine
stories of that era will be about. They will probably be told
about things like time clocks, or seventeen layers of management
chains, or be bottleneck stories from bureaucracies where
information couldn't flow up and down because of organization
blockages of some kind.
Future stories may include how there were corporate dinosaurs
too slow to learn that while all managers have six assets
to manage - space, money, material, time, systems, and people
- only one asset manages the other five. And that meant that
human-resource development was the key to succeeding in the
communication age.
And the stories may well include those about the managers
who forgot a basic rule of a knowledge-based company: that
taking care of the customers is taking care of the future.
We need the good humor to enjoy our yellow-margarine stories in the communication age. But for everybody's sake, we also need the insight to commit ourselves to linking and unleashing the human mind-as the most powerful act of creativity we can engage in as a society. |
