Introduction
The Next Management: Management for Understanding seeks to contribute to a better grasp of the direction toward which our organizations and management are progressing. If Ford pictured his company as a big machine where everyone did something and only one person, Ford, did all the thinking, a century later organizational life is too complex, too interdependent, too varied for this conception to be valid. Nonetheless, many of the theoretical and practical categories ruling organizations' operations are still founded on the belief in centrally planned structures, strategies that guide all critical aspects of actions, and people who act by obeying their managers.
To further our understanding of this topic, before discussing the book's content I would like to invite readers to make a joyful detour in order to look at an extreme case that will facilitate our comprehension of our everyday reality. What type of organization is the Internet? Many people have already incorporated it into their lives, and many more do so every day. Its high efficiency makes us forget that it is an organization, albeit one that barely resembles Henry Ford's, which still shapes our mental models more often than we realize. A cursory review of the Internet's organizational dynamics and history may help us identify certain features of our own organizations that go unnoticed because they are usually obscured by our mental structures.
A brief history of an infinite organization[1]
The emergence and development of the Internet greatly differs from those of other technologies such as the telegraph, the telephone, or the satellite for two reasons. First, because when it was originally conceived, in the 1960s, nobody could foresee its destiny or its future magnitude. Second, because its unique characteristics led to the involvement of an array of actors in its creation and in its thirty-year evolution into a network of networks for innovation. If it was hard to forecast the Internet's fate, it was even harder to picture the ways in which traditional means of communication and media (such as the telephone, newspapers, books, television, the radio, music, or film) would be redefined, bolstered, or modified by it, or the new modes of communication and meeting whose creation it would facilitate.
The Internet goes back to the 1960s, during the cold war, when it was created to satisfy a need shared by the academic world and the United States government. The latter sought to take advantage of the possibilities offered by computers by creating networks that would make it possible to boost computer strength and share information. Universities, in turn, were faced with the problem posed by the fact that each major researcher and laboratory wished to have computers and, due to the latter's bulk and prize, satisfying this demand would entail a costly duplication of efforts and resources. ARPAnet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, was created to address this issue, and was joined by other academic networks and government institutions over the years.
We are all able to understand who operates the telegraph, the mail, or the telephone, and how, but we can hardly grasp how the Internet works. Its structure requires the participation of many and diverse actors. It was not possible to appeal only to the expert community, business people, defense agencies, or government officials to manage it; all the parties implicated in its development must be included. The Internet called for a different collective action mechanism, for the political, intellectual, and commercial climate that surrounded it opposed government management. Moreover, its structure was so spread out and the organizations contributing to its development so diverse and informal that no group - not even the United States government - could organize it unilaterally. In fact, nothing resembling an entity with a specific location, a building, a budget, and a sign on the door that read "Internet" was ever in charge. Everything that needed to be done (which was a lot), every step taken involved initiatives, ideas, and agreements among many and diverse players, each of whom carried too much weight and held too much critical knowledge to be ignored.
The Internet does not have and has never had a centralized administration responsible for implementing technologies and policies that regulate access and use - each network that makes it up establishes its own rules. The only existing agency is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). This agency manages the domain system, that is, the mechanism to obtain and assign domains in the web. Internet protocols and rule standardization are the responsibility of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an engineering non-profit organization comprising volunteers from all over the world who contribute their technical knowledge. Most of its members are engineers with knowledge of protocols and software who have little interest in the political and commercial aspects of the web.
ICANN is the agency that determines, for instance, the procedure to acquire a domain from where to operate. It was created neither by law nor as part of a strategy. Rather, it stemmed from an agreement attained by many different actors. While this agreement had a rationale and a general purpose, nobody knew precisely what it was until after it had been forged. In July 1998 150 experts from the five continents met under their own initiative in a hotel in Reston, Virginia, in the United States. According to the participants, the group comprised technophiles in T-shirts, lawyers in suits, academics, and businesspeople. Their mission was to devise a model and establish shared principles, a structure, and general regulations[2] for the constitution of a global body that would manage Internet names and domains. Even though the Internet was already in operation, it lacked an official agency that would fulfill this role and thus facilitate participation in the web. While they produced a document that looked a lot like an Internet constitution, attendants at this meeting were neither government officials nor legislators, nor did they bear formal credentials. In the 1990s John Quaterman described the Internet as a "chaotic ménage à trois of government, academia, and business" (Quaterman, 1999). This was the first of five meetings (one of them held in Buenos Aires that same year) known as the International Forum of the White Paper (IFWP).
The meeting was held at that particular time because the explosion of commercial Internet was already noticeable. By 1998 the web had ceased to be just an education and research tool subsidized by the United States and including scientific networks in the United Kingdom and France to become a new global means of communication. Yet while it grew exponentially and its relevance to world economy was already clear, some crucial technical functions were still being performed by the United States' Department of Defense and National Science Foundation on a contract basis. Other governments, however, were growing increasingly suspicious of the fact that the North American country bore unilateral control over a resource so pivotal to global communications infrastructure. For this reason, in 1997 an initiative emerged to create a private body independent of any government[3] that would administer the Internet and make the most important policy decisions. From this meeting stemmed ICANN, an agency that does not much resemble anything anybody may have pictured as the type of institution that might manage something as important as the Internet. The group that met at the Reston hotel that summer of 1998 created a non-profit body ruled by California State laws and composed of businesses, social organizations, universities, governments, and the community of users and experts.
The Internet's prehistory started about thirty years earlier (in 1969) with the aforementioned ARPAnet project, which was based in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Despite the fact that its founding role has endowed it with almost mystical connotations, back then ARPAnet barely connected 200 people in twenty-one nodes. It was based on the transmission of informational packets onto network links, and was not supported by the TCP/IP protocol technology in use today. Its goals varied according to the different groups involved. For academics it was a way of boosting their resources, but politically it performed a significant defensive role - to generate a spread-out network that would survive subordinate-network losses without losing information. The first node was created at the University of California at Los Angeles, and constituted the backbone of the Internet until 1990 - once the transition to the TCP/IP protocol that had started in 1983 was completed. The entire project constituted an ongoing exploration guided by two central ideas, namely, 1) the use of a decentralized network with manifold paths between two points and the division of full messages into fragments that would follow different paths, and 2) the ability to transmit a message notwithstanding the collapse of part of the network. Although redundant and not very efficient from a traditional perspective, this system was incredibly effective and safe.
ARPAnet's most impressive achievement may have been having brought together the people who would play a key role in the future of the Internet in the next thirty years. Several milestones marked the development of the web during those years. Moreover, the community of actors connected with it - or "the Internet community," as it came to be known - started to grow and became increasingly complex as the technology expanded and its notoriety transcended scientific and academic borders. The remarkable expansion of the Internet among the general public started in 1993 with the launch of the World Wide Web (WWW). With the emergence of various commercial applications, the web became a global, massive means of communication and trade.
This development led to an explosion of domain names. The number of pages grew exponentially as it became easier for users to create pages and documents and upload them. In Mueller's words, a serendipitous intersection of technologies produced human and market factors that transformed one technology’s function (…) Many technologies end up being used in ways that their designers never intended or visualized. These unanticipated uses in turn can generate inflection points in a technology’s evolution by provoking new forms of economic activities and new forms of regulation. This in turn can reward certain technological capabilities and effectively foreclose others. (Mueller, 2002: 109-110)
Almost thirty years after the meeting of that heterogeneous contingent, the technology has acquired a ubiquity unthinkable to its pioneers. While this initial group had developed ideas and projects in relation to its potential uses, the new functions and power gained by the Internet stemmed not from the strategic thinking of one or of several people but from their desire to make it open to running codes.
This very brief history of the Internet portrays a phenomenon that greatly challenges the organizational knowledge we have acquired since the industrial revolution. We find that the most incredible and revolutionary event of our times is the product not of a carefully devised plan, but of a creative assembly of existing resources based on some relatively simple key ideas. In the Internet all players know that they are facing a new process where novel phenomena are constantly occurring and must be addressed. Improvisation has become a form of strategy; nobody asked permission to create Google, Wikipedia, Linux, Kindle, or anything else. Those who manage the web make decisions on very general rules, but do not generate changes; rather, they discover that these have already been made. For this reason, instead of creating planned futures, designs code, organize previous changes.
The web's influence over existing media could be surmised, but the ways in which it resignified each of these media was impossible to foresee. We live in a world where deeds can only be understood after the fact. There is so much knowledge involved in the Internet, so many empirical data, so many dissertations, so many different players that no single actor can appropriate it on his or her own. If it emerged to a large extent as a defense strategy, why did it not remain in the hands of the United States army? We do no know for certain, but it is very likely that without university academics and engineers or businesspeople the project would have gotten nowhere, or at least it would not have progressed far beyond the starting point. Many of the initiatives that fill the Internet originated in networks linking universities, research centers, risk investors, government officials, military people, and creative youth. Organizational forms always came later. Institutional meetings organize what has already been done; decision-making regarding future developments, though crucial, is limited. Players act on their own behalf and in keeping with the weight they carry; not many of them obey orders or report to governing hierarchical structures. The organization that is changing the world is formed by a set of components that are constantly being assembled, and the structures ruling it are deliberately minimal - as if the actors involved believed that a small structure gives rise to big things.
Each of the Internet's organizational features calls into question much of the knowledge on management that we have acquired since the inceptions of the industrial revolution. The web is a technical system, but it is clearly also a political, plural system based on joint knowledge and capacity building whose driving force is not obedience but meaning. Furthermore, the organizations surrounding us increasingly resemble the Internet in this sense, because the traits described are not exclusive to the web but typical of all knowledge organizations. These organizations are the topic of this book, which draws from a few great authors, particularly Karl Weick, Bill Mac Kelvey, Henry Mintzberg, Etienne Wenger, John Seely Brown, and David Perkins. Perkins, who teaches at Harvard University's School of Education, coined the notion of "knowledge for understanding." This type of knowledge may be applied autonomously under different conditions from the ones that marked its acquisition. In a sense, the next management will be a management for understanding. Rather than striving to make people follow orders, it will aim to make them grasp the organization's workings and context so that they may generate their own answers. Organizations are too complex, and reality too surprising for managers to be able to tell people what they must do in each situation.
In an organization composed of relatively autonomous people, emerging phenomena, which are the product of the convergence of many micro decisions, carry a lot of weight. Such convergence brings about unintended consequences, and therefore the organization cannot be explained exclusively on the basis of the actors' intentions. This is the topic of the first chapter.
If these organizations cannot be understood on the basis of actors' intentions, we must search for other explanations that show us how they become what they are. Evolutionary theories can explain how an object may attain a pattern that appears premeditated to the observer but is actually the product of selection processes taking place within the company or in the environment. These theories, especially those of Bill Mac Kelvey and Karl Weick, form the core of the second chapter.
Given that in the organizations analyzed here knowledge and learning constitute factors of production, knowledge bears great relevance to this study. The third chapter dwells on this concept and differentiates it from that of information. Moreover, it shows how the former notion resembles a mode of relationship rather than an object to be owned, for the various groups involved in building it recreate it.
The fourth chapter aims to contribute to the understanding of knowledge as an eminently social process by discussing practice as a form of knowledge. Practice implies doing, and we use this word not only to designate "things that are being done," but also to refer to activities that are validated to a certain extent by groups that share this knowledge and recognize each other as such.
If learning is a social fact, we cannot understand it unless we take into account the communities and networks that generate it, where besides knowledge individuals build identity and meaning. This is the topic of the fifth chapter.
The case of the Internet is interesting, among other things, because it enables us to see how growth produces knowledge. This process is opposite to the one traditionally described - how knowledge produces growth. Chapter 6 analyzes the case of an Argentine engineering company that is much more "solid" - or at least tangible - than the Internet where growth also builds knowledge. I discussed and wrote it with a colleague from the Universidad de San Andrés, Alejandro Artopoulos.
I have devoted a large part of my practice to work training, which constitutes the topic of my previous books. I decided, therefore, to revisit many of the most innovative concepts that are meant to explain this practice in light of the new context. In chapter 7 I take up again three old cases to discuss them from a different perspective on training.
The last chapter, "The Next Management," endeavors to outline the distinctive traits of a mode of management, management for understanding, geared toward a leadership that is more concerned with grasping and helping to grasp the organizational context than with obedience. This chapter is strongly based on texts by Minztberg and Weick, and is backed by many short case studies written by my students at the Universidad de San Andres's master's program on organizational studies.
References
Mueller, Milton (2002). Ruling the Root. Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace. Boston, MA: The MIT Press.
Quaterman, John S. (1999). Monitoring the Internet. Matrix News. 9 (5).
[1] This explanation is adapted from a personal note that Carolina Aguerre, my colleague at the university, added to her dissertation.
[2] For more specific information on this meeting see Mueller (2002).
[3] In any case, the United States government had power over this body until 2009 through its Department of Commerce.
The Next Management: Management for Understanding seeks to contribute to a better grasp of the direction toward which our organizations and management are progressing. If Ford pictured his company as a big machine where everyone did something and only one person, Ford, did all the thinking, a century later organizational life is too complex, too interdependent, too varied for this conception to be valid. Nonetheless, many of the theoretical and practical categories ruling organizations' operations are still founded on the belief in centrally planned structures, strategies that guide all critical aspects of actions, and people who act by obeying their managers.
To further our understanding of this topic, before discussing the book's content I would like to invite readers to make a joyful detour in order to look at an extreme case that will facilitate our comprehension of our everyday reality. What type of organization is the Internet? Many people have already incorporated it into their lives, and many more do so every day. Its high efficiency makes us forget that it is an organization, albeit one that barely resembles Henry Ford's, which still shapes our mental models more often than we realize. A cursory review of the Internet's organizational dynamics and history may help us identify certain features of our own organizations that go unnoticed because they are usually obscured by our mental structures.
A brief history of an infinite organization[1]
The emergence and development of the Internet greatly differs from those of other technologies such as the telegraph, the telephone, or the satellite for two reasons. First, because when it was originally conceived, in the 1960s, nobody could foresee its destiny or its future magnitude. Second, because its unique characteristics led to the involvement of an array of actors in its creation and in its thirty-year evolution into a network of networks for innovation. If it was hard to forecast the Internet's fate, it was even harder to picture the ways in which traditional means of communication and media (such as the telephone, newspapers, books, television, the radio, music, or film) would be redefined, bolstered, or modified by it, or the new modes of communication and meeting whose creation it would facilitate.
The Internet goes back to the 1960s, during the cold war, when it was created to satisfy a need shared by the academic world and the United States government. The latter sought to take advantage of the possibilities offered by computers by creating networks that would make it possible to boost computer strength and share information. Universities, in turn, were faced with the problem posed by the fact that each major researcher and laboratory wished to have computers and, due to the latter's bulk and prize, satisfying this demand would entail a costly duplication of efforts and resources. ARPAnet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, was created to address this issue, and was joined by other academic networks and government institutions over the years.
We are all able to understand who operates the telegraph, the mail, or the telephone, and how, but we can hardly grasp how the Internet works. Its structure requires the participation of many and diverse actors. It was not possible to appeal only to the expert community, business people, defense agencies, or government officials to manage it; all the parties implicated in its development must be included. The Internet called for a different collective action mechanism, for the political, intellectual, and commercial climate that surrounded it opposed government management. Moreover, its structure was so spread out and the organizations contributing to its development so diverse and informal that no group - not even the United States government - could organize it unilaterally. In fact, nothing resembling an entity with a specific location, a building, a budget, and a sign on the door that read "Internet" was ever in charge. Everything that needed to be done (which was a lot), every step taken involved initiatives, ideas, and agreements among many and diverse players, each of whom carried too much weight and held too much critical knowledge to be ignored.
The Internet does not have and has never had a centralized administration responsible for implementing technologies and policies that regulate access and use - each network that makes it up establishes its own rules. The only existing agency is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). This agency manages the domain system, that is, the mechanism to obtain and assign domains in the web. Internet protocols and rule standardization are the responsibility of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an engineering non-profit organization comprising volunteers from all over the world who contribute their technical knowledge. Most of its members are engineers with knowledge of protocols and software who have little interest in the political and commercial aspects of the web.
ICANN is the agency that determines, for instance, the procedure to acquire a domain from where to operate. It was created neither by law nor as part of a strategy. Rather, it stemmed from an agreement attained by many different actors. While this agreement had a rationale and a general purpose, nobody knew precisely what it was until after it had been forged. In July 1998 150 experts from the five continents met under their own initiative in a hotel in Reston, Virginia, in the United States. According to the participants, the group comprised technophiles in T-shirts, lawyers in suits, academics, and businesspeople. Their mission was to devise a model and establish shared principles, a structure, and general regulations[2] for the constitution of a global body that would manage Internet names and domains. Even though the Internet was already in operation, it lacked an official agency that would fulfill this role and thus facilitate participation in the web. While they produced a document that looked a lot like an Internet constitution, attendants at this meeting were neither government officials nor legislators, nor did they bear formal credentials. In the 1990s John Quaterman described the Internet as a "chaotic ménage à trois of government, academia, and business" (Quaterman, 1999). This was the first of five meetings (one of them held in Buenos Aires that same year) known as the International Forum of the White Paper (IFWP).
The meeting was held at that particular time because the explosion of commercial Internet was already noticeable. By 1998 the web had ceased to be just an education and research tool subsidized by the United States and including scientific networks in the United Kingdom and France to become a new global means of communication. Yet while it grew exponentially and its relevance to world economy was already clear, some crucial technical functions were still being performed by the United States' Department of Defense and National Science Foundation on a contract basis. Other governments, however, were growing increasingly suspicious of the fact that the North American country bore unilateral control over a resource so pivotal to global communications infrastructure. For this reason, in 1997 an initiative emerged to create a private body independent of any government[3] that would administer the Internet and make the most important policy decisions. From this meeting stemmed ICANN, an agency that does not much resemble anything anybody may have pictured as the type of institution that might manage something as important as the Internet. The group that met at the Reston hotel that summer of 1998 created a non-profit body ruled by California State laws and composed of businesses, social organizations, universities, governments, and the community of users and experts.
The Internet's prehistory started about thirty years earlier (in 1969) with the aforementioned ARPAnet project, which was based in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Despite the fact that its founding role has endowed it with almost mystical connotations, back then ARPAnet barely connected 200 people in twenty-one nodes. It was based on the transmission of informational packets onto network links, and was not supported by the TCP/IP protocol technology in use today. Its goals varied according to the different groups involved. For academics it was a way of boosting their resources, but politically it performed a significant defensive role - to generate a spread-out network that would survive subordinate-network losses without losing information. The first node was created at the University of California at Los Angeles, and constituted the backbone of the Internet until 1990 - once the transition to the TCP/IP protocol that had started in 1983 was completed. The entire project constituted an ongoing exploration guided by two central ideas, namely, 1) the use of a decentralized network with manifold paths between two points and the division of full messages into fragments that would follow different paths, and 2) the ability to transmit a message notwithstanding the collapse of part of the network. Although redundant and not very efficient from a traditional perspective, this system was incredibly effective and safe.
ARPAnet's most impressive achievement may have been having brought together the people who would play a key role in the future of the Internet in the next thirty years. Several milestones marked the development of the web during those years. Moreover, the community of actors connected with it - or "the Internet community," as it came to be known - started to grow and became increasingly complex as the technology expanded and its notoriety transcended scientific and academic borders. The remarkable expansion of the Internet among the general public started in 1993 with the launch of the World Wide Web (WWW). With the emergence of various commercial applications, the web became a global, massive means of communication and trade.
This development led to an explosion of domain names. The number of pages grew exponentially as it became easier for users to create pages and documents and upload them. In Mueller's words, a serendipitous intersection of technologies produced human and market factors that transformed one technology’s function (…) Many technologies end up being used in ways that their designers never intended or visualized. These unanticipated uses in turn can generate inflection points in a technology’s evolution by provoking new forms of economic activities and new forms of regulation. This in turn can reward certain technological capabilities and effectively foreclose others. (Mueller, 2002: 109-110)
Almost thirty years after the meeting of that heterogeneous contingent, the technology has acquired a ubiquity unthinkable to its pioneers. While this initial group had developed ideas and projects in relation to its potential uses, the new functions and power gained by the Internet stemmed not from the strategic thinking of one or of several people but from their desire to make it open to running codes.
This very brief history of the Internet portrays a phenomenon that greatly challenges the organizational knowledge we have acquired since the industrial revolution. We find that the most incredible and revolutionary event of our times is the product not of a carefully devised plan, but of a creative assembly of existing resources based on some relatively simple key ideas. In the Internet all players know that they are facing a new process where novel phenomena are constantly occurring and must be addressed. Improvisation has become a form of strategy; nobody asked permission to create Google, Wikipedia, Linux, Kindle, or anything else. Those who manage the web make decisions on very general rules, but do not generate changes; rather, they discover that these have already been made. For this reason, instead of creating planned futures, designs code, organize previous changes.
The web's influence over existing media could be surmised, but the ways in which it resignified each of these media was impossible to foresee. We live in a world where deeds can only be understood after the fact. There is so much knowledge involved in the Internet, so many empirical data, so many dissertations, so many different players that no single actor can appropriate it on his or her own. If it emerged to a large extent as a defense strategy, why did it not remain in the hands of the United States army? We do no know for certain, but it is very likely that without university academics and engineers or businesspeople the project would have gotten nowhere, or at least it would not have progressed far beyond the starting point. Many of the initiatives that fill the Internet originated in networks linking universities, research centers, risk investors, government officials, military people, and creative youth. Organizational forms always came later. Institutional meetings organize what has already been done; decision-making regarding future developments, though crucial, is limited. Players act on their own behalf and in keeping with the weight they carry; not many of them obey orders or report to governing hierarchical structures. The organization that is changing the world is formed by a set of components that are constantly being assembled, and the structures ruling it are deliberately minimal - as if the actors involved believed that a small structure gives rise to big things.
Each of the Internet's organizational features calls into question much of the knowledge on management that we have acquired since the inceptions of the industrial revolution. The web is a technical system, but it is clearly also a political, plural system based on joint knowledge and capacity building whose driving force is not obedience but meaning. Furthermore, the organizations surrounding us increasingly resemble the Internet in this sense, because the traits described are not exclusive to the web but typical of all knowledge organizations. These organizations are the topic of this book, which draws from a few great authors, particularly Karl Weick, Bill Mac Kelvey, Henry Mintzberg, Etienne Wenger, John Seely Brown, and David Perkins. Perkins, who teaches at Harvard University's School of Education, coined the notion of "knowledge for understanding." This type of knowledge may be applied autonomously under different conditions from the ones that marked its acquisition. In a sense, the next management will be a management for understanding. Rather than striving to make people follow orders, it will aim to make them grasp the organization's workings and context so that they may generate their own answers. Organizations are too complex, and reality too surprising for managers to be able to tell people what they must do in each situation.
In an organization composed of relatively autonomous people, emerging phenomena, which are the product of the convergence of many micro decisions, carry a lot of weight. Such convergence brings about unintended consequences, and therefore the organization cannot be explained exclusively on the basis of the actors' intentions. This is the topic of the first chapter.
If these organizations cannot be understood on the basis of actors' intentions, we must search for other explanations that show us how they become what they are. Evolutionary theories can explain how an object may attain a pattern that appears premeditated to the observer but is actually the product of selection processes taking place within the company or in the environment. These theories, especially those of Bill Mac Kelvey and Karl Weick, form the core of the second chapter.
Given that in the organizations analyzed here knowledge and learning constitute factors of production, knowledge bears great relevance to this study. The third chapter dwells on this concept and differentiates it from that of information. Moreover, it shows how the former notion resembles a mode of relationship rather than an object to be owned, for the various groups involved in building it recreate it.
The fourth chapter aims to contribute to the understanding of knowledge as an eminently social process by discussing practice as a form of knowledge. Practice implies doing, and we use this word not only to designate "things that are being done," but also to refer to activities that are validated to a certain extent by groups that share this knowledge and recognize each other as such.
If learning is a social fact, we cannot understand it unless we take into account the communities and networks that generate it, where besides knowledge individuals build identity and meaning. This is the topic of the fifth chapter.
The case of the Internet is interesting, among other things, because it enables us to see how growth produces knowledge. This process is opposite to the one traditionally described - how knowledge produces growth. Chapter 6 analyzes the case of an Argentine engineering company that is much more "solid" - or at least tangible - than the Internet where growth also builds knowledge. I discussed and wrote it with a colleague from the Universidad de San Andrés, Alejandro Artopoulos.
I have devoted a large part of my practice to work training, which constitutes the topic of my previous books. I decided, therefore, to revisit many of the most innovative concepts that are meant to explain this practice in light of the new context. In chapter 7 I take up again three old cases to discuss them from a different perspective on training.
The last chapter, "The Next Management," endeavors to outline the distinctive traits of a mode of management, management for understanding, geared toward a leadership that is more concerned with grasping and helping to grasp the organizational context than with obedience. This chapter is strongly based on texts by Minztberg and Weick, and is backed by many short case studies written by my students at the Universidad de San Andres's master's program on organizational studies.
References
Mueller, Milton (2002). Ruling the Root. Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace. Boston, MA: The MIT Press.
Quaterman, John S. (1999). Monitoring the Internet. Matrix News. 9 (5).
[1] This explanation is adapted from a personal note that Carolina Aguerre, my colleague at the university, added to her dissertation.
[2] For more specific information on this meeting see Mueller (2002).
[3] In any case, the United States government had power over this body until 2009 through its Department of Commerce.
