Yesterday, we contrasted the social intelligence of Douglas McGregor versus Hernando De Soto's. McGregor focuses our social growth on our own intrinsic intelligence and creativity, while De Soto focuses our social growth on the external reward of well defined property rights. McGregor's ideas of an intelligent man are closer to our human nature rather than De Soto's ideas of a man happy with his defined property rights. And I find McGregor's genius revealing as he visualizes, in the late 1950s, a knowledge based economy where the conventional notions of productivity are meaningless. And I feel gratified to provide the following excerpt from McGregor's essay "New Concepts of Management"

...Intellectual creativity cannot be 'programmed' and directed the way we program and direct an assembly line or an accounting department. This kind of intellectual contribution to the enterprise cannot be obtained by giving orders, by traditional supervisory practices, or by close systems of control. Even conventional notions of productivity are meaningless with reference to the creative intellectual effort. Management has not yet considered in any depth what is involved in managing an organization heavily populated with people whose prime contribution consists of creative intellectual effort...[Heil/Bennis/Stephens 2000 page 145]

References

On Hernando De Soto, a mechanical economist, and Douglas McGregor, a humanist at work, by Mario deSantis, December 30, 2000

Douglas McGregor, Revisited: Managing the Human Side of the Enterprise, by Gary Heil, Warren Bennis, Deborah C. Stephens, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2000. ISBN 0-471-31462-5. Gary Heil and Deborah C. Stephens are coufounders of the Center for Innovative Leadership http://www.cfil.com/ And Warren Bennis is Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the University of Southern California http://behavior.net/column/bennis/bio.html