The NEW Manager 5.0

Davos 2023 loves technical utopias and showcases them with artistic positions. The result "No Real Change for the Near Future" calls many things into question - including our present.

Changing big boss management practices in -one too many- companies are often deeply rooted in the core beliefs and traditional cultures - often even subconsciously! Using new and different methods and practices won’t be enough to adapt. It needs to break the well known patterns, unlearn and then relearn. But how?

The rapid changes of the Internet, innovation, and advances in Information

Technology led to a high growth rate of Information Systems implementation in all facets of life. This brought a series of experts and allured the young generation to become more and more IT freaks for a bright future. But also billionaires who now start falling short of new ideas and loosing some of the big boss wealth. Where is this game going NOW?

Let us take a step back: The economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, born 1911, who emigrated to England because of the ‘Grössenwahn’ der Nazis, was one of the early birds making his voice heard against the consequences of an economic system based on purely 'Grössenwahn' by technical growth. Another example was Alexander Rüstow, one of the founders of the Freiburger School of Economics, who found exile in Istanbul in 1933.

Even then, important issues were advanced by those minds: the abolition of all legal privileges, the breaking up of monopoly positions and open economic competition that offered opportunities for advancement for everyone.

Now, however, when we read back, what was written almost 100 years ago:

"Ever bigger machines, which result in an ever greater concentration of economic power and ever greater violence against our environment, do not represent progress. You deny wisdom. Knowledge requires a reorientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, towards the elegant and beautiful / Any intelligent idiot can make things bigger, more complicated and more violent. But it takes a lot of talent and courage to go in the opposite direction.”

And today? We - well sometimes - are still blurred: Information Technology professionals for example are growing in number while they are also facing several challenges at the same time. Beat the neighbor but stay mentally alive? Psychological wellbeing is gaining most popularity in the present scenario among them as they are seeking for mental wellbeing and the capability for facing day-to-day job stress.

Although a strong recommendation of coping measures is vital for improving psychological wellbeing among (not only) IT professionals in parallel doing ecologically good to our environment, it is absurd that Rüstow’s or Schumacher's analyzes of wild technologization have not created any real echo chambers in the engineering sciences or today’s future promising AI industry.

Our global Davos 2023 system still showcases that without art and literature at the driving seat is, the whole system is geared inevitably towards increasing capital, and not rather carefully towards the appreciation of the real capital, i.e. with mineral resources, with nature and with the inner well-being of human resources.

Who has not warned us yet of the dangers of nuclear power?

My good friend Ruben from our old times at Aynalikavak, Bodrum still continues to do that periodically, and even so, the big train does go to another destination.

Source: 'Rubje' / Ruben Oppenheimer

He like many others before him, including Robert Oppenheimer suspected that things will go wrong, if we follow dead-ends: the exploitation of the Human per se,if we...well you know well, the dependent countries of the South, targeted at their raw materials, by the countries of the North… who has not warned that this would lead to violence?

If that is the situation, what freedoms do today's Davos 2023 technical visions promise, what about their sustainability? If a person is alienated and disempowered, could we have a system with many small units, and thus for a kind of "reconciliation" of city and country, of man and machine?

It is not late for all of us, but we are speeding against the rate of population growth with a tendency of more and more failing educational institutions not well spread enough to accommodate quality education. Polulation growth needs it, not in some countries but in many.

Today even in industrialized countries, such as Germany for example, the public discussion centers around the incompatibility between the one of the highest individual social contribution to the State yet the lack of progress in the educational institutions and the quality of the education…

If that is the situation, what freedoms do today's Davos 2023 technical visions promise, what about their sustainability?

When I look back 5 years at the technical visions promised 2018 in Davos, I still get a colorless picture. It paints a picture of a car in the snow without snow-tyres: carefully planned space flights for a clientele of millionaires, if not billionaires. For all these technologies, including for the acceleration of e-mobility, huge amounts of raw materials, rare earths, are needed, which will be mined (far away from us, the observer) under the most (colorless) inhumane conditions, maybe in Africa?, leaving ecological deserts in their wake.

Davos historical visions as well as the new ones had and have nothing to do with the real living environment, neither with the problems of the majority populations on all continents. Yes we need 'Something Better (not bigger)'. Something that helps navigating the uncertainties of the digital age. Something that gives purpose again to micro/macro/global management.

Yet what can some do if they -albeit not fully - lack a social and ecological awareness that re-starts with confrontation of the basic ideas of Rüstow and Schumacher? Well, the answer might begin with re-connecting...Collaborate to Co-Develop! Many Many Beginnings to 'well-connected' New Managers 5.0 then!