Of course that was, practically speaking, impossible. But nevertheless, it probably could have been attempted in some fashion, and industrialization would have been slow and piecemeal as a result. Unlike industrial processes that were not completely scalable economically, the information revolution is built largely around scalable hardware and software. It actually is possible to simply seek to push out the new technology into the existing structures, which can lead to progress of some description. Old paradigms do not fade gently into new ones.
Revolutions are, by definition, an upheaval.
Managing a revolution, then, clearly involves redefining management in terms of the new technologies and the new possibilities they offer. Peter Drucker talks about this in terms of a knowledge society. Above all, making knowledge productive is a management responsibility, he said. And to do this, knowledge has to aim high to produce results. Making knowledge productive requires the systematic exploitation of opportunities for change, and that has been relatively limited in government.