If it was Max Weber who first defined bureaucracy and predicted its triumph, Warren Bennis may go down in sociological textbooks as the man who first convincingly predicted its demise and sketched the outlines of the organizations that are springing up to replace it. At precisely the moment when the outcry against bureaucracy was reaching its peak of shrillness on American campuses and elsewhere, Bennis, a social psychologist and professor of industrial management, predicted flatly that "in the next twenty-five to fifty years" we will all "participate in the end of bureaucracy." He urged us to begin looking "beyond bureaucracy."

Thus Bennis argues that "while various proponents of 'good human relations' have been fighting bureaucracy on humanistic grounds and for Christian values, bureaucracy seems most likely to founder on its inability to adapt to rapid change ...

"Bureaucracy," he says, "thrives in a highly competitive undifferentiated and stable environment, such as the climate of its youth, the Industrial Revolution. A pyramidal structure of authority, with power concentrated in the hands of a few ... was, and is, an eminently suitable social arrangement for routinized tasks. However, the environment has changed in just those ways which make the mechanism most problematic. Stability has vanished."

Each age produces a form of organization appropriate to its own tempo. During the long epoch of agricultural civilization, societies were marked by low transience. Delays in communication and transportation slowed the rate at which information moved. The pace of individual life was comparatively slow. And organizations were seldom called upon to make what we would regard as high-speed decisions.

The age of industrialism brought a quickened tempo to both individual and organizational life. Indeed, it was precisely for this reason that bureaucratic forms were needed. For all that they seem lumbering and inefficient to us, they were, on the average, capable of making better decisions faster than the loose and ramshackle organizations that preceded them. With all the rules codified, with a set of fixed principles indicating how to deal with various work problems, the flow of decisions could be accelerated to keep up with the faster pace of life brought by industrialism.

Weber was keen enough to notice this, and he pointed out that "The extraordinary increase in the speed by which public announcements, as well as economic and political facts are transmitted exerts a steady and sharp pressure in the direction of speeding up the tempo of administrative reaction ..." He was mistaken, however, when he said "The optimum of such reaction time is normally attained only by a strictly bureaucratic organization." For it is now clear that the acceleration of change has reached so rapid a pace that even bureaucracy can no longer keep up. Information surges through society so rapidly, drastic changes in technology come so quickly that newer, even more instantly responsive forms of organization must characterize the future.

What, then, will be the characteristics of the organizations of super-industrial society? "The key word," says Bennis, "will be 'temporary'; there will be adaptive, rapidly changing temporary systems." Problems will be solved by task forces composed of "relative strangers who represent a set of diverse professional skills."

Executives and managers in this system will function as coordinators between the various transient work teams. They will be skilled in understanding the jargon of different groups of specialists, and they will communicate across groups, translating and interpreting the language of one into the language of another. People in this system will, according to Bennis, "be differentiated not vertically, according to rank and role, but flexibly and functionally, according to skill and professional training."

Because of the high rate of movement back and forth from one transient team to another, he continues, "There will ... be a reduced commitment to work groups ... While skills in human interaction will become more important, due to the growing needs for collaboration in complex tasks, there will be a concomitant reduction in group cohesiveness ... People will have to learn to develop quick and intense relationships on the job, and learn to bear the loss of more enduring work relationships."

This then is a picture of the coming Ad-hocracy, the fast-moving, information-rich, kinetic organization of the future, filled with transient cells and extremely mobile individuals. From this sketch, moreover, it is possible to deduce some of the characteristics of the human beings who will populate these new organizations – and who, to some extent, are already to be found in the prototype organizations of today. What emerges is dramatically different from the stereotype of the organization man. For just as the acceleration of change and increased novelty in the environment demand a new form of organization, they demand, too, a new kind of man.

Three of the outstanding characteristics of bureaucracy were, as we have seen, permanence, hierarchy, and a division of labor. These characteristics molded the human beings who manned the organizations. Permanence – the recognition that the link between man and organization would endure through time – brought with it a commitment to the organization. The longer the man stayed within its embrace, the more he saw his past as an investment in the organization, the more he saw his personal future as dependent upon that of the organization. Longevity bred loyalty. In work organizations, this natural tendency was powerfully reinforced by the knowledge that termination of one's links with the organization very often meant a loss of the means of economic survival. In a world wracked by scarcity for the many, a job was precious. The bureaucrat was thus immobile and deeply oriented toward economic security. To keep his job, he willingly subordinated his own interests and convictions to those of the organization.

Power-laden hierarchies, through which authority flowed, wielded the whip by which the individual was held in line. Knowing that his relationship with the organization would be relatively permanent (or at least hoping that it would be) the organization man looked within for approval. Rewards and punishments came down the hierarchy to the individual, so that the individual, habitually looking upward at the next rung of the hierarchical ladder, became conditioned to subservience. Thus: the wishy-washy organization man – the man without personal convictions (or without the courage to make them evident). It paid to conform.

Finally, the organization man needed to understand his place in the scheme of things; he occupied a well-defined niche, performed actions that were also well-defined by the rules of the organization, and he was judged by the precision with which he followed the book. Faced by relatively routine problems, he was encouraged to seek routine answers. Unorthodoxy, creativity, venturesomeness were discouraged, for they interfered with the predictability required by the organization of its component parts.

The embryonic Ad-hocracies of today demand a radically different constellation of human characteristics. In place of permanence, we find transience – high mobility between organizations, never-ending reorganizations within them, and a constant generation and decay of temporary work groupings. Not surprisingly, we witness a decline in old-fashioned "loyalty" to the organization and its sub-structures.

Writing about young executives in American industry today, Walter Guzzardi, Jr., declares: "The agreements between modern man and modern organization are not like the laws of the Medes and the Persians. They were not made to stand forever ... The man periodically examines his own attitude toward the organization, and gauges its attitude toward him. If he doesn't like what he sees, he tries to change it. If he can't change it, he moves." Says executive recruiter George Peck: "The number of top executives with their resumes in their desk drawer is amazing."

The old loyalty felt by the organization man appears to be going up in smoke. In its place we are watching the rise of professional loyalty. In all of the techno-societies there is a relentless increase in the number of professional, technical and other specialists. In the United States between 1950 and 1969 alone, their number has more than doubled and this class continues to grow more rapidly than any other group in the work force. Instead of operating as individual, entrepreneurial free lancers, millions of engineers, scientists, psychologists, accountants and other professionals have entered the ranks of organization. What has happened as a result is a neat dialectical reversal. Veblen wrote about the industrialization of the professional. Today we are observing the professionalization of industry.

Thus John Gardner declares: "The loyalty of the professional man is to his profession and not to the organization that may house him at any given moment. Compare the chemist or electronics engineer in a local plant with the non-professional executives in the same plant. The men the chemist thinks of as his colleagues are not those who occupy neighboring offices, but his fellow professionals wherever they may be throughout the country, even throughout the world. Because of his fraternal ties with widely dispersed contemporaries, he himself is highly mobile. But even if he stays in one place his loyalty to the local organization is rarely of the same quality as that of the true organization man. He never quite believes in it.

"The rise of the professions means that modern large-scale organization has been heavily infiltrated by men who have an entirely different concept of what organization is about ..." In effect, these men are "outsiders" working within the system.

At the same time, the term "profession" is itself taking on new meaning. Just as the vertical hierarchies of bureaucracy break down under the combined impact of new technology, new knowledge, and social change, so too, do the horizontal hierarchies that have until now divided human knowledge. The old boundaries between specialties are collapsing. Men increasingly find that the novel problems thrust at them can be solved only by reaching beyond narrow disciplines.

The traditional bureaucrat put electrical engineers in one compartment and psychologists in another. Indeed, engineers and psychologists in their own professional organizations assumed an airtight distinction between their spheres of knowledge and competence. Today, however, in the aerospace industry, in education, and in other fields, engineers and psychologists are frequently thrown together in transient teams. New organizations reflecting these sometimes exotic intellectual mergers are springing up all around the basic professions, so that we begin to find sub-groupings of bio-mathematicians, psycho-pharmacologists, engineer-librarians and computer-musicians. Distinctions between the disciplines do not disappear; but they become finer, more porous, and there is a constant reshuffling process.

In this situation, even professional loyalties turn into short-term commitments, and the work itself, the task to be done, the problem to be solved, begins to elicit the kind of commitment hitherto reserved for the organization. Professional specialists, according to Bennis, "seemingly derive their rewards from inward standards of excellence, from their professional societies, and from the intrinsic satisfaction of their task. In fact, they are committed to the task, not the job; to their standards, not their boss. And because they have degrees, they travel. They are not good 'company men'; they are uncommitted except to the challenging environments where they can 'play with problems.'"

These men of the future already man some of the Ad-hocracies that exist today. There is excitement and creativity in the computer industry, in educational technology, in the application of systems techniques to urban problems, in the new oceanography industry, in government agencies concerned with environmental health, and elsewhere. In each of these fields, more representative of the future than the past, there is a new venturesome spirit which stands in total contrast to the security-minded orthodoxy and conformity associated with the organization man.

The new spirit in these transient organizations is closer to that of the entrepreneur than the organization man. The free-swinging entrepreneur who started up vast enterprises unafraid of defeat or adverse opinion, is a folk hero of industrialism, particularly in the United States. Pareto labeled the entrepreneurs "adventurous souls, hungry for novelty ... not at all alarmed at change."

It is conventional wisdom to assert that the age of the entrepreneur is dead, and that in his place there now stand only organization men or bureaucrats. Yet what is happening today is a resurgence of entrepreneurialism within the heart of large organizations. The secret behind this reversal is the new transience and the death of economic insecurity for large masses of educated men. With the rise of affluence has come a new willingness to take risks. Men are willing to risk failure because they cannot believe they will ever starve. Thus says Charles Elwell, director of industrial relations for Hunt Foods: "Executives look at themselves as individual entrepreneurs who are selling their knowledge and skills." Indeed, as Max Ways has pointed out in Fortune: "The professional man in management has a powerful base of independence – perhaps a firmer base than the small businessman ever had in his property rights."

Thus we find the emergence of a new kind of organization man – a man who, despite his many affiliations, remains basically uncommitted to any organization. He is willing to employ his skills and creative energies to solve problems with equipment provided by the organization, and within temporary groups established by it. But he does so only so long as the problems interest him. He is committed to his own career, his own self-fulfillment.

It is no accident, in light of the above, that the term "associate" seems suddenly to have become extremely popular in large organizations. We now have "associate marketing directors" and "research associates," and even government agencies are filled with "associate directors" and "associate administrators." The word associate implies co-equal, rather than subordinate, and its spreading use accurately reflects the shift from vertical and hierarchical arrangements to the new, more lateral, communication patterns.

Where the organization man was subservient to the organization, Associative Man is almost insouciant toward it. Where the organization man was immobilized by concern for economic security, Associative Man increasingly takes it for granted. Where the organization man was fearful of risk, Associative Man welcomes it (knowing that in an affluent and fastchanging society even failure is transient). Where the organization man was hierarchyconscious, seeking status and prestige within the organization, Associative Man seeks it without. Where the organization man filled a predetermined slot, Associative Man moves from slot to slot in a complex pattern that is largely self-motivated. Where the organization man dedicated himself to the solution of routine problems according to well-defined rules, avoiding any show of unorthodoxy or creativity, Associative Man, faced by novel problems, is encouraged to innovate. Where the organization man had to subordinate his own individuality to "play ball on the team," Associative Man recognizes that the team, itself, is transient. He may subordinate his individuality for a while, under conditions of his own choosing; but it is never a permanent submergence.

In all this, Associative Man bears with him a secret knowledge: the very temporariness of his relationships with organization frees him from many of the bonds that constricted his predecessor. Transience, in this sense, is liberating.

Yet there is another side of the coin, and he knows this, as well. For the turnover of relationships with formal organizational structures brings with it an increased turnover of informal organization and a faster through-put of people as well. Each change brings with it a need for new learning. He must learn the rules of the game. But the rules keep changing. The introduction of Ad-hocracy increases the adaptability of organizations; but it strains the adaptability of men. Thus Tom Burns, after a study of the British electronics industry, finds a disturbing contrast between managers in stable organizational structures and those who find themselves where change is most rapid. Frequent adaptation, he reports, "happened at the cost of personal satisfaction and adjustment. The difference in the personal tension of people in the top management positions and those of the same age who had reached a similar position in a more stable situation was marked." And Bennis declares: "Coping with rapid change, living in the temporary work systems, setting up (in quick-step time) meaningful relations – and then breaking them – all augur social strains and psychological tensions."

It is possible that for many people, in their organizational relationships as in other spheres, the future is arriving too soon. For the individual, the move toward Ad-hocracy means a sharp acceleration in the turnover of organizational relationships in his life. Thus another piece falls into place in our study of hightransience society. It becomes clear that acceleration telescopes our ties with organization in much the same way that it truncates our relationships with things, places and people. The increased turnover of all these relationships places a heavy adaptive burden on individuals reared and educated for life in a slower-paced social system.

It is here that the danger of future shock lies. This danger, as we shall now see, is intensified by the impact of the accelerative thrust in the realm of information.