Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue
• The museum of corporate dinosaurs
• Part One Yesterday's Assumptions
• Introduction
• What Theodore Vail knew (1885-1950)
• Part Two Destandardization
• The Pink Princess Policy (1950-1970)
• The super-industrial communications market
• Part Three Rising Novelty Ratios
• The management of surprise
• Part Four Tomorrow's Assumptions: A model of super-industrialism
• What Theodore Vail did not know
• A temporary goal. Part Five Tomorrow's Structure
• Organizational problems
• Part Six Shaping a Super-Industrial Corporation
• Modular functions
• Framework functions
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Selected bibliography
• Appendix A Alternative strategies for public participation
• Appendix B Partial list of individuals consulted
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

In 1968 Toffler got a futurist's dream assignment: to re-envision AT & T, rethink its ""corporate mission."" The present book is the report he submitted in 1972 (and heard nothing about for years), preceded by hoopla about ""the adaptive corporation"" and interspersed with retrospective commentary. In the aftermath, Toffler doesn't pretend to have been the agent of change (though he does speak of his report, pronounced by inside-sympathizers too Tofflerian for management--""overdramatic, apocalyptic, sensational""--as having circulated in ""samizdat,"" then being distributed ""in revised form""). But what the reader wants to know, allowing for Toffler's verbal extravagance, is how good was his counsel. First, his diagnosis of AT & T's pre-divestiture situation? Sociologically and technologically, he was right about the shift toward diversification and its implications for AT & T, founded on universal, standardized service, and vertically integrated: the demand for specialized new products and services (from handsets to data transmission facilities) required change, and greater complexity, throughout the Bell organization from manufacturing to marketing. Where he sounds both out-of-date and (as he did back-when) airborne is in his generalized new-society conclusions: ""The ad-hocracies of tomorrow will require a totally different set of human characteristics""; ""the new technology is driving us. . . toward the most highly differentiated social structures in history. . . ."" He was nonetheless right to counsel flexibility, as against the rule-hook, and ""participation,"" as against stratification: the two giant steps of recent management reform. And he did suggest, ""as delicately as I could"" (he now writes), that Bell might spin-off the operating companies. This is very cagily put, in terms of recent AT & T history and political realities (regulatory and consumer pressures)--by contrast with Toffler's flashier visions and even his ""good citizenship"" exhortations. He presents the report as a case study--and it is both an intriguing part of the AT & T story and a shrewd job of corporate/industrial forecasting. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Alvin Toffler was born in New York on October 4, 1928. He received a degree in English from New York University in 1950. While in college he helped register black voters in North Carolina. After graduating, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio with his wife Heidi and took a production job in a factory. He learned to weld and repair machinery. In 1954, he became a reporter for Industry and Welding. He went on to become a reporter for Labor's Daily and then as a labor editor and columnist for Fortune magazine. He left Fortune in 1962 and began a freelance-writing career covering politics, technology, and social science for scholarly journals and writing long interviews for Playboy magazine.

He wrote 13 books during his lifetime including Future Shock, The Third Wave, and Powershift. He received a career achievement award in 2005 from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. In 1996, he and his wife formed Toffler Associates, a global forecasting and consulting company. He died on June 27, 2016 at the age of 87.

(Bowker Author Biography)