New Book Resource
by Lisa Kimball

THE KNOWLEDGE EXECUTIVE: Leadership in an Information Society, by Harlan Cleveland, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1985. $18.95. 260pp.

Harlan Cleveland's widely read THE FUTURE EXECUTIVE (1972) has had a major influence on managers and their training programs for the past decade. This new book promises to be a keystone for the managers of the next ten years. Cleveland, who is currently Dean of the University of Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey
Institute of Public Affairs, has served as Associate Secretary of State, Ambassador to NATO, and President of the University of Hawaii. He has spent years studying executives and their jobs. THE KNOWLEDGE EXECUTIVE is full of Cleveland's ideas about the implications of the information society for executive work--much of it based on his own extensive experience with technologies, including computer conferencing. He calls the marriage of computers and telecommunications the "central event of our time."

Cleveland identifies several key ideas which can help us think about what the new information environment means for leadership and the executive function:

1. Information is not *like* other resources.

2. The ultimate effect of all knowledge is to organize
things or people, to arrange them in ways that make
them different from the way they were before.

3. There is a distinction between the information
itself and the service of delivering it.

He suggests that we have carried over into our thinking about *information*, concepts which were developed for the management of *things*, e.g. property, depletion, depreciation, monopoly, market economics, the class struggle, and top-down leadership. "The assumptions we have inherited are not producing
satisfactory growth with acceptable equity in either the capitalist West or the socialist East," says Cleveland. The solution? Stop treating information as "just another *thing*, a commodity with pseudophysical properties, and look hard instead at what makes it so special." Some of these special qualities include:

* Information is expandable--in an information society
we trade glut for scarcity. The ultimate limits to
growth of knowledge and wisdom are TIME and the
CAPACITY of people to analyze and think integratively.

* Information is compressible--it can be concentrated,
integrated, summarized, and miniaturized for easier
handling. As a result, the information society is not
resource-hungry because production and distribution
are sparing in their requirements for energy and other
physical resources.

* Information is substitutable--it can replace land,
labor, and capital. "People who use computers hooked
up to telecommunications don't need much real estate
to be efficient... Any machine that can be accessed
by computerized telecommunications doesn't have to be
in your own inventory."

* Information is transportable--there has been a major
dimensional change in both the speed and volume of
human activity because of this change in
transportability of resources. Remoteness is now more
choice than geography.

* Information is diffusive--information is
"aggressive, even imperialistic, in striving to break
out of the unnatural bonds of secrecy in which thing-
minded people try to imprison it. The straightjackets
of public secrecy, intellectual property rights, and
confidentiality of all kinds fit very loosely on this
restless resource."

* Information is shareable--*things* are exchanged but
if I sell you an idea, we both have it. "The
information-rich environment is thus a sharing
environment. That needn't mean an environment without
standards, rules, conventions, or ethical codes. It
does mean the standards, rules, conventions, and codes
are going to be different from those created to manage
the zero-sum bargains of market economics and
traditional international relations."

Cleveland believes that the first task for leaders is to reassess concepts created to deal with problems of the management of *things*, e.g. scarcity, bulk, limited substitutability, expense and trouble of transportation, and ability to hoard. He points out that the characteristics of physical resources made possible hierarchies which are crumbling today--power based on control, influence based on scarcity,
class based on ownership, privilege based on early access to valuable resources, and politics based on geography.

"The explosive fusions of computers and telecommunications are changing the options and opportunities for the generalist leaders and especially for those who lead by getting things done--the executives," says Cleveland. "Those who learn how to achieve access to the bath of knowledge that already envelopes the world will be the future's aristocrats of achievement."