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As a view of Business and Organisational futurology from the perspective of 1989, this is an interesting set of ideas and forty years later readers can reflect on how prescient they were.

At the heart of the book is the adage that Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world whilst unreasonable people adapt the world to themselves. The author’s view of the future is one of significant remodelling and changing of the world to fit human needs, so it is an unavoidable age of Unreason.

Chapter 2 gives an interesting statistical basis for the prognostications. In 1986 we hear that 43% of young people left UK schools without a single significant qualification. That outcome is unimaginable today so clearly something significant has indeed changed.

Another interesting statistic was the change in working hours. The author tells us that when he began his career, employees worked roughly 47 hours per week, for 47 weeks per year for 47 years. Now they work (roughly) 37 hours per week, for 37 weeks per year, for 37 years. 47 x 47 x 47 is roughly 100,000, whereas 37 x 37 x37 is roughly 50,000. So during the authors life, the average working span of an adult has halved. That is clearly a significant development, but what it means for the world of work was a little less clear.

Some of the author’s predictions were clearly very apposite, especially the transition to Ideas and Intellectual capital which he forecasts in Chapter 6. He suggests that 3I = AV, where the triple I is Intelligence, Information and Ideas and the AV is added value.

Some of the educational suggestions were imaginative but would involve significant reorganisation of the system and there wasn’t really a rationale for that specific kind of reorganisation. For example, yes schools could sub-contract aspects of their curriculum. A school could cease to employ Physics teachers, for example, and buy in all their Physics teaching from a Physics-Teacher-Agency. I could imagine that leading to better specialist teaching and even better availability of Physics teachers, but it would require government level intervention to effectively change the terms and conditions of the nations teachers. And why would a government want to wade into that kind of complexity?

Some of the other proposals seemed misfocused. For example, the author suggested that perhaps we should end Income taxes and just focus on expenditure taxes. Yes, there are arguments for doing so, but there is also a strong set of Psychological factors which the author did not consider. Loss Aversion is the bias whereby people will feel hard done by if they are given two coins, but one is taken away; whereas they will not feel hard done by if they are just given one coin to start with. Giving people a salary and then taking that money away is emotionally much harder for people than taking their taxes invisibly in taxation before they ever get their salary. Good ideas have got to meet the test of Psychological acceptability, especially in democracies where governments will be punished for failing to do so.

Another idea suggested by the author was paying people in time instead of money towards the end of their careers. He (righly) notes that people earn the most, after they have struggled through the years where they could have done with the higher salary (ie buying houses, etc). So perhaps wages should be restructured to that outcome, by paying time instead of money at the end of careers?

An interesting idea, but of course it already exists where people can work part time. The very definition of part time is having more time for oneself, and earning less to achieve it. There is nothing revolutionary in that idea, unless of course it is the suggestion that companies should be more flexible to allow it.

Overall, this was an interesting set of ideas but some of its more imaginative suggestions seemed to lack the deeper exploration that would be necessary before they could seem feasible enough to actively consider.