Only the ethical need apply

"Individual discretion mattered very little" in manufacturing companies with huge bureaucracies and elaborate hierarchies, says Joseph Grenny, author of "Crucial Confrontations." Today, "the need for greater integration and cooperation in the workplace means human values become more important because they're the glue of a community."

Trust is one of those values. Many of the business scandals in the past 10 years - such as Enron, Worldcom, ImClone, and Parmalat - would have been met with a yawn 50 or 100 years ago, Mr. Grenny says.

Today, they're more alarming because trust is at a greater premium.

"We feel so much more vulnerable because we are so much more interdependent," says Grenny. If someone manipulates the markets in Asia, it will have an effect in London, he adds as an example.

The amount of social capital or trust required in the world today for things to continue to function is far greater. As a result, tolerance for ethical lapses is shrinking.

Ethical culture lives or dies every day when someone chooses either to speak up or to remain silent, Grenny asserts. The consequences of not speaking up, however, are now more significant.

"The glue of trust in any society is people's capacity to confront mistrust," says Grenny, whose company VitalSmarts teaches employees the art of the uncomfortable conversation. You can measure the health of a society by how openly people are able to confront problems with each other, he says. To the degree that we can't and the problems remain suppressed, he says, trust erodes and we start to lose all the benefits of community.

The whole human system gets pressured significantly by technology, Grenny says. It exposes the weaknesses of a social system and demands that we either resolve them or suffer more acutely.

He offers e-mail as an example: In the old days, one person's grievance may have affected only the immediate team. Today, it can be telegraphed across an entire organization. One individual can wreck havoc by sharing a complaint with all the names in his or her entire address book.

"Until people learn to ethically, maturely, and directly deal with their crucial conversations, technology will amplify rather than mitigate our dysfunctions," says Grenny.

Dr. De Long offers another side of that argument. Relational knowledge, the "know-who" rather than the know-how, as he puts it, will become more critical as organizations increasingly depend on technology systems and computers.

How quickly technology makes the leap is any futurist's guess.

Artificial intelligence researchers have repeatedly been overly optimistic about the pace at which machines would take over "intelligent" tasks, Prof. Malone says.

But while past projections have been off, Malone agrees that technology has already had a dramatic impact on communication.

By reducing the cost of communications exponentially, it is changing the fundamental structure of business, he says. Organizations will become more fluid and decentralized as huge numbers of people have enough information to make intelligent decisions and choices for themselves.

"We're in the early stages of an increase in human freedom in business that may in the long run be as important a change for business as the change to democracies was for governments," he says.

One inevitable consequence of this shift, he says, will be more transparency. Access and openness make it harder to get away with unethical behavior.

Job descriptions in the future, says William Rothwell, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, will likely focus on the three-dimensional view - the type of person rather than simply the tasks.

It won't be "just what they can do," he says, "but the kind of person they are, ethically, morally."

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