Take Today: The Executive as Dropout

328 Pages·1972·45.392 MB·English

by  Marshall McLuhan, Barrington Nevitt

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BY
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TAKE TODAY.
THE EXECUTIVE AS DROPOUT
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt
Marshall McLuhan is probably the most original
theorist of the postindustrial world. No other con-
temporary social critic can match the daring of his
imagination, the sheer profusion and richness of
his insights. McLuhan has been called "the oracle
of the electric age" and "the sage of Aquarius."
The reason seems obvious: life has already begun
to imitate his mantic art.
In Take Today, McLuhan, with his co-author
Barrington Nevitt, is again concerned with the
future. The past, McLuhan and Nevitt say, is too
much with us. Theworld's managers have failed to
adapt to "the age of speed-up." They persist in
their "hardware" thinking; they are relics of the
industrial world of assembly lines and visual space.
They become "diehards holding the old manage-
ment fort." And now their specialized jobs have
become casualties, displaced by the electric world
of "software" and programming.
The old era came to an end with the launching
of Sputnik in 1957. With the new satellite sur-
round, the earth was instantaneously transformed
into a global theater, whose inhabitants became
not only observers but theobserved. They could no
longer remain simply spectators. The sudden
change made them participants, actors, people in-
volved in role-playing on a global scale. Old ex-
perience is no longer relevant. Man must, say
McLuhan and Nevitt, reinvent Nature—the old
natural order has been scrapped, made obsolete by
electriccommunicationsand satellites. To this end,
the executive will have to drop out of his old or-
ganizational structures, whether these are in busi-
ness, the military, the church, the universities, or
government.
Take Today is a major work. Using brilliant
aphorisms, strikingilluminations,puns, andprobes,
the authors show how Nature must now be re-
created as an art form, "perfectly accommodated
to the totality of human needs and aspirations."
HarcourtBraceJovanovich, Inc.
757 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017
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TAKE TODAY
The Executive as Dropout

Other books by Marshall McLuhan
The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
Explorations in Communications
(with E. S. Carpenter)
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Voices of Literature
(with R. /. Schoeck)
The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
War and Peace in the Global Village
Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting
(with Harley Parker)
Counterblast
(withHarley Parker)
Culture Is Our Business
From Cliche to Archetype
(with Wilfred Watson)