All this happened, more or less.

This atorin's post got me thinking about why the art of management has been developed so rapidly in the US. It appears that the emergence of what I would call a system-wide scalable intelligence was necessary for a large country with a fast growing market, constrained by the lack and/or high cost of qualified labor.
Economies of Germany and the British Empire, while being also highly efficient, relied on bureaucracies and highly-trained professionals, including the military, to achieve their goals. In Russia and China labor was cheap and market practically non-existent. Managers had to follow their superiors' whims rather than react to ever-changing market conditions.
In the United States, though, the scale of the economy, long shipping distances, flexible government regulations, entrepreneurship, labor shortages required managers to deliberately orchestrate delivery of the right raw materials or finished goods to places where they can be used in a most efficient manner. In this task they could not rely on professional skills of their labor force. Instead, they had to build their "control" system on simplicity, trust and self-interest.
Many new technologies such as steam engine, electricity, mechanical computation, stock market, and even the Web, originally invented in the old world, were successfully scaled-up by American managers and entrepreneurs. The need for business, military, and entertainment computing drove the rise of an "intelligent" information society, where even the least educated members can still interact with and enjoy the benefits of the most advanced technology, Internet being the latest example.
Freedom of speech and communications push the requirements envelope with regard to the quantity, variety, and "deliverability" of information that technology entrepreneurs have to handle, if they want to be successful in the marketplace. Google, Microsoft, eBay, Cisco, Oracle, and others carry out huge amount of management tasks while working on multiple strategy levels, from corporate to product division to individual.
The scale and scope of outsourcing is another challenge that system-wide scalable intelligence has to handle in order to stay competitive in the global environment. Here the story of American management and finance pioneers of the nineteenth and the twentieth century is about to repeat itself. Distributed knowledge and often a lack of thereof requires precision and flexibility of a sophisticated control system, built as before on simplicity, trust and enlightened self-interest.

office entrance -
faces turning
into interfaces