Time & Perspective Quote by Warren G. Bennis

A joke with teeth: Bennis paints automation not as a sleek upgrade but as a regime of enforced passivity. The image of a “factory of the future” staffed by a man and a dog lands because it’s absurdly specific. It turns a complex economic forecast into a slapstick tableau where the remaining human role is caretaking, and the “smart” worker is essentially a liability to be managed.

The subtext is managerial, not merely technological. Bennis isn’t predicting that machines will run everything; he’s warning about how organizations choose to deploy machines. The dog is the punchline and the threat: a living security system whose job is to stop human improvisation. That’s a darkly comic summary of what bureaucracy does when it fetishizes efficiency and control. In that future, the factory doesn’t just automate tasks; it automates authority, hard-coding decision-making into equipment, software, and protocols that people are punished for questioning.

Context matters: Bennis came out of organizational psychology and leadership studies, writing through the late-20th-century arc of mechanization, quality regimes, and early computerization, when “human error” was increasingly framed as the main operational risk. The line anticipates today’s algorithmic workplaces, where dashboards tell you what to do, and deviation looks like sabotage.

The wit works because it flips a familiar promise. Technology is supposed to free workers for higher-value creativity; Bennis suggests it may instead shrink the human footprint until “employment” means being present, compliant, and kept away from the real levers of power.