1985/Cleveland

==Ideas==
* DIKW
* Leadership studies
* Connected Education
==Parts==
==Views==
; Magill Book Reviews
The leader, asserts Harlan Cleveland, is a generalist, a coordinator of the activities of others. Advances in technology and knowledge through the centuries have changed the qualifications for leadership from rank to achievement; now the mushrooming developments in computer and telecommunications technologies, and those results when they are used together, are transforming methods of executive leadership. It is essential that the manager understand how information technology affects the business of getting things done through others.
After surveying the evolution of the leader’s role as a generalist, Cleveland discusses how information has replaced material things as the major resource that must be managed, and he goes on to discuss how attempting to manage information using techniques developed to manage things will cause trouble for leaders. His discussion focuses on the following: the control of leadership when more, not fewer, people have access to much more information than ever before; the control of access to information and control of who shall benefit from its use; how to ensure the fair distribution of information and fair access of it; and the global ramifications resulting from these developments. He then considers some of the social changes that will be necessary for a successful transition to leadership in an information-dominated world, suggesting that schooling at all levels must integrate formerly distinct branches of knowledge and emphasize global causes and effects; he suggests further that the best use to which society can put older members of the work force may well be to continue to use their accumulated wisdom.
Cleveland, currently dean of the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, draws on his wide reading and his extensive experience as an administrator, both public and academic, for this book. Extensively referenced, the book is rich in anecdote and very readable. Whether one agrees with Cleveland’s suggestions and conclusions, one will thoroughly enjoy reading what he has to say.
Source: Magill Book Reviews, ©2005 Salem Press, Inc.. All Rights Reserved. 
http://www.enotes.com/knowledge-executive-salem/knowledge-executive
; Lisa Kimball Carlson
Netweaver - October, 1985 
Title: BOOK REVIEW - The Knowledge Executive by Harlan Cleveland
Author: Lisa Kimball Carlson
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."
http://groupjazz.com/netweaver/archive/nw85-a33.html
==See also==
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* 
==Cites==