Comparative analysis of global trends in 21st century for management and genetics

Comparative analysis of global trends in 21st century for management and genetics

Wenting Jiang

We are now facing to a whole new era of the world, the 21st century, whereas many common concepts and ideas used before are no longer compatible to the new century. The trends will deeply affect the way of thinking, operating and leading in management. Interestingly, when talking with some of my friends dedicating in biology, especially genetics, I found out that many trends happened in management can also be found in modern genetics. So let’s explore some of the important new ideas in both areas which are seemed to be far away.

First of all, this is the time for information, all kinds of information develops explosively. Through internet, the information is floating around and anyone at anywhere can get access to it. So for the management, how to handle the information and select from them the most useful ones are becoming more and more important. We need high efficient thinkers and high intelligent teams to do the job.

Same for the genetics, after Watson and Crick discover the molecular structure of DNA, all of the information contained in the molecule seemed to be clear and with one major problem, too many information! For example, human genome contains approximately 750 Megabytes of data with all kinds of possible combinations. How can we handle them? Similar to management, well, the thinkers we have for genetic analysis are powerful computers with great ability of handling large data size.

Beyond explosive information, another trend we have is the faster rate of change; this increases the data size even more. Steady information is limited, no matter how big it is, these information can be studied and explored to the end, but with change, it is hard to say when it will end. For the future managers, the skills of insight and imagination are essential. The skill of insight will grant you the ability of anticipating trends and problems, and change before it happens. Good imagination also does the same job as insight; making use of reasonable imagination for the future will help you to do better preparation before others.

Modern genetics is also an area full of changes, which geneticists call it mutation. Gene is not steady as it changes with a certain rate but with random direction. Especially for microorganisms, the rate of change is really fast, that’s one of the reasons why we cannot treat many diseases well, such as Aids, it is easy to kill a particular kind of virus, but what if it changes?

Interconnectedness is also a sign and nature of the new era. Boundary-less of different areas and more and more inner connections between them have been shown everywhere. Just like this paper would point out, comparison between genetics and management, how can we imagine that there are so many similarities and connections between these two areas before? Management now is not an isolate subject but a broader and general idea applied in many areas, and in the opposite, knowledge from other areas also affect management greatly. Many breakthrough ideas are “stolen” from other subjects, such as economics, physics, psychology, chemistry and many others. Furthermore, inside management itself, many ideas from unlinked areas are transformed to each other’s systems to help developing its completeness.

Same thing happens in genetics, rather than its own tasks, geneticist will cooperate with other scientists to do more complex research. It is closely related to biology, neuroscience, physiology, agriculture, chemistry, artificial intelligence and so on. As mentioned above, in order to handle large data size, geneticists rely on computer. So computer algorithm design, mathematics, engineering and software design contribute a lot to genetics. The inner connections of genetics seemed to be more important, as gene itself is a highly organized and connected object. It contains many elements and each of them has its specific function of coding, control or protection.

Large amount of information, fast-changing and interconnectedness, the combination of the above three points forms the complete complexity description of the new world. The image of it is a dynamic, interconnected, complex and fast-paced world. Everything is moving, changing and connected. Based on the similarities of management and genetics, the skills and theorem can be shared between each other. “Simple agents with simple rules can create complex and unexpected behavior.” That’s what chaos theory says and it has been applied to management and creates an idea that the behavior of people or organization are pretty much unpredictable. We should use our insight and integrative thinking to deal with it.

This is also the situation of the modern genetics. Before the molecular structure, classic genetics is quite simple based on two Mendel’s law: law of segregation and law of independent assortment. But after the discovery of DNA, things change. Although the structure of DNA is still simply enough, with 4 different bases forming base pairs, three bases form a codon which will encode one amino acid. In total, 64 possible combinations of codons to encode 20 different amino acids.The rules are still simple, but with over 3 billion base pairs in the human genome, chaos is formed. Only 1.5% of genes are coding protein, together with large amount of genes with unknown functions. Simple agents with simple rules, but nearly impossible to predict its behavior. The change made this situation worse. Unpredictable behavior of genes plus the unpredictable behavior of mutation, what are we expecting to do?

Fortunately, the way used in management can also be applied here, integrative thinking, anticipating the result first from the experience and then think creatively. With only one slight change, instead of human intelligence, the thinker is the powerful computer. Scientists will teach the computer to think in that way; input the entire database, build algorithm for the computer to let them go through all the possibilities and output the desired results or the most possible ones.

This is just one of the examples that the management and genetics will share the same techniques to achieve the goals, we can imagine that after the development of both areas, more and more similarities will be discovered and they will contribute each other with their own methods, techniques, skills, ideas and concepts. Also, for the other subjects, the same rules here, just as one of the trends, interconnectedness, says that the connections among everything in the world will help each other, fulfill each other, and at last, build a wonderful future for each other.