Take Today: The Executive as Dropout PDF
Preview Take Today: The Executive as Dropout
TODAY TAKE AS THE EXECUTIVE DROPOUT BY Marshall McLuhan AND Barrington Nevitt &cxnss\c $9.9: TAKE TODAY. THE EXECUTIVE AS DROPOUT Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt Marshall McLuhan is probably the most original theorist of the postindustrial world. No other con- temporary social critic can match the daring of his imagination, the sheer profusion and richness of his insights. McLuhan has been called "the oracle of the electric age" and "the sage of Aquarius." The reason seems obvious: life has already begun to imitate his mantic art. In Take Today, McLuhan, with his co-author Barrington Nevitt, is again concerned with the future. The past, McLuhan and Nevitt say, is too much with us. Theworld's managers have failed to adapt to "the age of speed-up." They persist in their "hardware" thinking; they are relics of the industrial world of assembly lines and visual space. They become "diehards holding the old manage- ment fort." And now their specialized jobs have become casualties, displaced by the electric world of "software" and programming. The old era came to an end with the launching of Sputnik in 1957. With the new satellite sur- round, the earth was instantaneously transformed into a global theater, whose inhabitants became not only observers but theobserved. They could no longer remain simply spectators. The sudden change made them participants, actors, people in- volved in role-playing on a global scale. Old ex- perience is no longer relevant. Man must, say McLuhan and Nevitt, reinvent Nature—the old natural order has been scrapped, made obsolete by electriccommunicationsand satellites. To this end, the executive will have to drop out of his old or- ganizational structures, whether these are in busi- ness, the military, the church, the universities, or government. Take Today is a major work. Using brilliant aphorisms, strikingilluminations,puns, andprobes, the authors show how Nature must now be re- created as an art form, "perfectly accommodated to the totality of human needs and aspirations." HarcourtBraceJovanovich, Inc. 757 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017 iZXsBEasxz Wffl8fflm luMiKftraB §y&RF$B^ K^WSCii? towSrafc^ v&vSfsS&t wit -'#»•» I IK B8B1 "'" ,v -vi '•'"•-'•:•••'••.'. . v : •' - 1 I :• S TAKE TODAY The Executive as Dropout Other books by Marshall McLuhan The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man Explorations in Communications (with E. S. Carpenter) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man Voices of Literature (with R. /. Schoeck) The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects War and Peace in the Global Village Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (with Harley Parker) Counterblast (withHarley Parker) Culture Is Our Business From Cliche to Archetype (with Wilfred Watson)
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