(FORTUNE Magazine) – One weekend in college, I read Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, getting ready for a lecture that followed a few days later. "Tiny steps for tiny minds" seemed to be the professor's philosophy. On the left side of the blackboard he wrote ANTONY in block letters; on the right, CLEOPATRA. He underlined each name, and as he talked, added more words beneath them. Under ANTONY he wrote MALE, perhaps for the edification of students who hadn't kept up with the reading. Then he wrote ROME and WAR and so on. Opposite them he wrote FEMALE, EGYPT, LOVE, etc., under the name of the infinitely various queen. After an hour, I walked enlightened into what remained of a New England morning.

At the risk of similar oversimplification, let's make a similar list. Let's write

TECHNOCRATS and HUMANISTS And beneath them: Frederick Taylor Douglas McGregor Theory X Theory Y Robert McNamara Lee Iacocca Staff Line Mainframe PC Reengineering Quality Hierarchy Teams

These pairs of opposites define a fault line in management thinking. An active fault line: Although the battle between the humanists and the technocrats for the managerial soul is of geological antiquity, it causes shocks and temblors constantly--and perhaps at no time more than now. These days the fate of your business may depend on how well you manage this fractious pair of horses. The reason: the stunning ubiquity and power of information technology.

Not since Edison domesticated electricity has a technology revolutionized work the way the computer has. Computers touch every industry and change the work of everyone--steelworker, secretary, farmer, financial planner. Name another technology that can prepare an invoice, animate a velociraptor, and sew a seam. Says Charles Wiseman, a professor at the Theseus Institute, a French business school whose curriculum focuses on the relationship between management and technology: "The original application of IT was to automate the obvious. But because it is so flexible, it began to affect power relationships, the distribution of information, and even competitive advantage."

Technocrats and humanists have rubbed against one another for the entire history of business. Gunnar Eliasson, an economics professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, uncovered a 1768 report by one J. Westerman called Om de svenske narigarnes undervigt genetmot de utlandske dymedelst en trogare arbetsdrift--meaning, of course, "On the Inferiority of Swedish Compared to Foreign Manufacturers Because of a Slower Work Organization." The patriotic Westerman had wondered why Swedish shipyards and ceramics factories were only half as productive as their British and Dutch counterparts. When he investigated, he found that the Swedes and their competitors used essentially similar machinery--that is, the Brits and Dutch had no advantage in technology--but the Swedes suffered because the human side of their enterprise was less well-conceived.

Today a manager's most important job may be to mediate between the claims of the technologists and the humanists, the Antony and Cleopatra of management theory. The technologists have an urge to control; the humanists have a wish to empower. And since technology changes but human nature doesn't, it's hard-side guys who've got miracles to sell.

The paradoxical result of the computer's fungible power is that it's never safe to doubt a techie's miraculous claims--and never safe to believe him. Take reengineering. (And take it we do: A 1994 survey of more than 600 large U.S. and European companies done for the CSC Index consulting firm, a reengineering powerhouse, found that seven out of ten had reengineering projects under way, and half the rest were considering them.) As its name implies, reengineering began as Taylorism for the Information Age. It insisted--and insists--on top-down, boss-led change.

Because reengineering attacks business processes that cut across functional boundaries, it scraps Taylorist notions of rigid divisions of labor, but it does depend on an elite cadre--"the design team," it's often called--that goes away from other managers and workers and then descends from the mountain to test and install its solution. And reengineering solutions usually involve big investments in new equipment, primarily computers and networking gear. In 1994, according to a Mountain View, California, research firm called G2, more than three-quarters of the $32 billion American companies planned to spend on reengineering last year went for technology. That $32 billion is more than 15 times what the U.S. spends to enhance productivity by importing coffee.

These high-tech Taylorists achieved astonishing results--sometimes. Admits Terry Neill, who heads the change management practice at Andersen Consulting, which does twice as much reengineering as any other consulting firm: "Ten, 15 years ago, we caused as many problems as we fixed. We learned that inserting the technology will not of itself do something wonderful." Every one of the ten most common reengineering mistakes listed by Michael Hammer and Steven Stanton in their new book, The Reengineering Revolution (excerpted in this issue), involves managers who ignored Cleopatra-side issues like leadership, courage, and the "concerns of your people."

The management problem posed by computers isn't just technology; it's also techies. This stuff is so pervasive and so great, says Wiseman, "you have to think about strategy and IT together." But that makes some humanists as uncomfortable as a plant manager entertaining an auditor from headquarters. As Wiseman puts it: "Do we want guys from the back office in the boardroom? Should our company depend on these characters for its future?"

Short answer: It already does. If you're in an information business--and you are--woe betide you if you don't pay attention to the technocrats of the Information Age. Most of what is bought and sold is intangible. The growth of services is obvious evidence of this, but it's also true that manufactured goods embody more knowledge than ever: The electronics in a car, for instance, cost more than the steel in it; microchips aren't valuable because the raw material--sand--is expensive but because of the elegance of their design and the intellectual sophistication of the machines that make them.

It follows that competitive advantage increasingly derives from the ability to manage knowledge--move information fast, control inventory precisely, exploit operational and strategic opportunities to cut costs or add value through information. The $3.5 billion Kmart earmarked to refurbish its stores for its showdown with Wal-Mart proved no match for the investments its Razorback rival made in its information system, a five-plus-terabyte wonder that allows Wal-Mart to deliver better service at lower cost.

Ironically it is the computer itself that will help reconcile those ancient opposites, technology and humanism. Tireless, never bored, unimaginably fast, computers strip away the mechanical, repetitive, soul-destroying elements of work-the re-adding of spreadsheets, the retyping of letters, the redrawing of blueprints. Left are the most essentially human tasks: sensing, judging, creating, building human relationships.

Computers, far from dehumanizing people, are adapting to our idiosyncratic humanity. Picture Frederick Taylor, the guy with the stopwatch, doing time-and-motion studies of your great-grandfather the bricklayer. Fast-forward to today: Andersen Consulting has a "usability lab" designed to uncover problems in the software it writes. In the portable version of the lab, the firm comes to your office, aims a camera at your computer and one at you, and records your keystrokes. A consultant watches, taking notes as you fumble, curse, or hit the help button. It looks like Taylor with a camcorder but for one crucial difference: Taylor stepped forward to tell the worker how to become more like a machine; the Andersen consultant goes back to tell the engineer how to make the machine more humane. INFOTECH IS DIFFERENT from other technologies: The more sophisticated it gets, the easier and more useful it is even for nonexperts. Says Mel Horwitch, who taught at Harvard business school and MIT's Sloan School before becoming professor of management at the Theseus Institute: "Technology will cause a resuscitation of general management in the old tradition." Mystifying in itself, it is a great demystifier, vastly increasing a manager's ability to move among and interpret the multiple worlds of finance, customers, and technology. It is democratizing. "The whole point of a network," Horwitch says, "is that people are important."

The debate between the technocrats and the humanists is unending, but taking sides in it is ultimately as sterile as educators' squabbles over whether to teach reading by phonics or by whole-word recognition. You don't pick one or the other; you do both and anything else that works. If I remember Antony and Cleopatra right, their problems didn't occur when they got together but when they were forced to part.

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