Second caveat, donвЂ™t make the mistake of thinking that each generation fully displaces the previous one in either military or business. And where they donвЂ™t line up, actual historical events should shape your thinking rather than the abstract idea of one sequence of generations driving another. You have to think like a historical artisan, matching up the conceptual boundaries of a constructivist notion youвЂ™re working with to real history. First, as with any clean, linear, sequential or cyclic model applied to a messy branching, evolutionary reality, you have to apply it very tastefully. Today, the coupling mainly has to do with relative rates of technology adoption in military vs business evolution, and to a lesser extent, shared exogenous events affecting both military and business affairs.ДҐ/ Before we get into it, a couple of caveats. In the past this was much stronger, due to a large number of men serving in wars and then entering business, and business being male-dominated. And I have a little bit of history here, my research during my PhD and postdoc fifteen-twenty years ago was on military command and control models, and a lot of my consulting work draws from that experience.Д¤/ For better or worse, the connection between military and business evolution happens to be historically solid, and seems set to remain true. But personally, IвЂ™ll admit IвЂ™m enough of both a military nerd and a management nerd that I actually find the connection stimulating rather than depressing to think about.

During WW2 for instance, business and military culture became almost the same thing for a few years.ДЈ/ This is not a universally popular idea because a significant number people find even the business-as-war metaphor distasteful, let alone the suggestion that military culture directly shapes business culture, or worst of all, that it is in fact the dominant source of business thinking. Strong enough to almost be determinative. Military ideas are not the only cause of course, but IвЂ™m going to argue that historically theyвЂ™ve been the strongest one. So if there are generations in warfare, they are going to cause generations in management. But it is guaranteed to emerge post-Covid because historically, big sharp disruptions have reliably triggered discontinuous changes in management culture, and it is already clear that this one is doing that.Дў/ The idea of generations in management, in the form IвЂ™m going to lay it out, is causally related to the idea of generations of warfare, and in particular the idea that contemporary styles of warfare strongly shape future styles of management. In todayвЂ™s episode, I want to talk about an idea I call fifth-generation management.ДЎ/ Fifth-generation management is an emerging style of management we donвЂ™t know much about because it doesnвЂ™t actually exist yet.

Empire total war crashes on startup