Post-Capitalist Society
The Industrial Revolution was brought about by the productivity revolution and the management revolution. It transitioned from general knowledge to specialized knowledge. The goal was to achieve an organized society and an employee society. In this society, service workers face issues related to their dignity. Knowledge workers, on the other hand, own the means of production called "knowledge" and cannot be managed by experts. The mobility of knowledge workers is high, and it is a form of capitalism without capitalists. There are tweets about the "post-capitalist society" and concerns about its collapse due to machine learning.
- The collapse of both Marxism as an ideology and communism as a social system revealed that we have transitioned to a new heterogeneous society. - The most important social force in the knowledge society is the knowledge worker.
- Just as capitalists knew how to allocate capital for productive use, knowledge workers know how to allocate knowledge for productive use. They are knowledge managers, experts, and employees who are employed by organizations. They own the means of production through pension funds, which have rapidly emerged as the sole true owners in advanced countries. They own knowledge and own the means of production in the sense that they can take their knowledge anywhere.
- The social issues in the post-capitalist society are related to the dignity of service workers, who are the second class of the post-capitalist society. In every advanced country, the majority consists of service workers who lack the education necessary to become knowledge workers.
- The post-capitalist society will be divided by values, not by the division between literary culture and scientific culture as shown by C.P. Snow. The division in this society is between intellectuals and organizers. The challenge in the post-capitalist society is to overcome this division and address the philosophical and educational issues.
- The Industrial Revolution was brought about by the application of knowledge. Knowledge, which was previously related to existence, became related to action overnight. Knowledge became a resource and became practical. Knowledge, which was once a private good, became a public good overnight.
- The transition from general knowledge to specialized knowledge is the essence of the changes that led to capitalism and made it dominant. Knowledge now serves the purpose of knowing how to effectively apply existing knowledge to produce results. This is what management is. Knowledge is also applied to systematic innovation.
- In the post-capitalist society, knowledge workers must acquire new knowledge every four to five years in any field. Otherwise, they will become outdated.
- Successful organizations incorporate systematic obsolescence into their structure. They thoroughly review every process, product, procedure, and policy every few years. They ask, "If we were not doing this but knew everything we know now, would we start it?" If the answer is no, they ask, "What should we do now?" Instead of reevaluating what they have been doing, they do something else. Organizations should plan for planned obsolescence rather than prolonging the life of successful strategies, actions, and products. However, currently, only a few large companies in Japan are doing this.
- Every organization must incorporate three systematic activities into its structure. First, organizations must continuously improve everything they do, known as kaizen in Japanese. The purpose of kaizen is to improve products and services to the point of creating completely new ones in two to three years. Second, organizations must pursue expansion, meaning they must develop new opportunities for already successful things. Japanese companies have been most successful in this regard. Third, organizations must innovate. Innovation can be organized as a systematic process. It is something that should be organized in that way.