This is because business is changing in profound ways, the scale of which nobody alive today has ever seen. As a matter of fact, this change will likely be as large as the Industrial Revolution, making it the biggest change in how we do business in two centuries. The term "paradigm shift" gets thrown around loosely, but this is the real thing.

Before the Industrial Revolution, the idea of "going to work" at a "job" didn't exist for most people. But the Industrial Revolution ushered in the Era of the Company, and companies have dominated our economic lives from that day until now. Generations of people in the industrialized countries fell in step with the Organization Man, and corporations, commuting, workweeks, and paychecks became trappings of modern life.

Throughout the 19th century, the domination of the company often reached beyond our economic lives, imposing hardships on their workers' entire existence while the "robber barons" profited to an excess not previously seen outside the ranks of royalty. The folk song "I Owe My Soul to the Company Store" is a testament to this era. But the labor unions that struggled in the latter years of the 19th century gained traction, then power, around the turn of the century and work conditions and salaries spiked upward.

Before the unions gained power, wages weren't usually high enough to relieve workers of most burdens, so most blue-collar and some white-collar workers raised their own food, made their own clothes, and often built their own homes. But as wages rose dramatically through the first couple decades of the 20th century, it became possible for the first time for working-class people to specialize in one thing (their job) and make enough money to purchase all the necessities of life from other specialists.

This sea change had an unintended consequence that didn't become fully evident for almost a century. Specialists are experts in their field. You're not, if you don't work in their field. So you have no authority to tell a specialist "your work isn't broad enough," or good enough, or whatever. So the specialists did what specialists do, focusing on smaller and smaller parts of life. Some say that specialists know more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about only one thing. Others are less kind, saying the climax condition for specialists is to know absolutely everything about nothing at all. In either case, specialization was the death knell of holistic living. Transportation engineering specialists built streets that transported more cars faster, but were dreadful places to walk. Volume builders built unlovable ranchers very efficiently. Shopping center developers built some of the most unwalkable places the world had ever seen in very efficient fashion as well. Together, the specialists built some of the most barbaric public realms in human history.

But the story doesn't end there... it gets worse... for awhile. Just a few years after the ascendency of the unions, the Great Depression struck, impaling almost all aspects of economic life for more than a decade. Most agree that FDR's massive top-down government programs such as the WPA were essential parts of pulling out of that grand morass. There's no doubt that WWII helped us pull out as well, but that war carried with it unforeseen baggage: never in American history had so many Americans been conditioned for so many years to obey orders from higher up the chain of command and control. The subservient attitudes of the 1950's should have come as no surprise.

We gave up even larger portions of our lives to the specialists. Women submitted to "twilight birth," where they were sedated to within an inch of consciousness. We let doctors perform whatever surgeries they recommended, with no thought of a second opinion. And we bought whatever houses the volume builders built. This condition persisted from the end of WWII until the mid-1960's, when we began to painstakingly take back aspects of our life one at a time. My mother fought valiantly for a "natural childbirth" for my youngest sister Hazel in 1969. That didn't include my Dad in the delivery room; all she accomplished was her ability to give birth without being sedated. More recently, we've taken back our ability to medicate ourselves with vitamins and herbs. I haven't taken prescription drugs in more than two decades... maybe three... I can't remember.

Social media is working magic that was unimaginable a decade ago. Once, we read the daily newspaper, watched the evening news, and followed the American Top 40. But over the past decade, we've learned how to speak to ourselves again. If you haven't read it, the Cluetrain Manifesto was simply prophetic of our day. And Seth Godin's Linchpin is essential reading a decade later. And so today, with as dreadful as conditions are in the place-making professions, I believe we're on the brink of a new Golden Age  because of the invention this new age of great necessities will foster. What do you think?

PS: This post is part of a bigger story outlined in New Media for Design Types. The next part of the story is Why Marketing Doesn't Work Anymore for Architecture.