Peter F. Drucker (1909 – 2005)
Austrian-born American writer, management consultant and university professor.
That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society "post-capitalist.
There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology, society, economy, and institutions.
The first step toward making the worker achieving is to make work productive.
Financial "synergy" is a will-o'-the-wisp.It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice.
The major incentive to productivity and efficiency are social and moral rather than financial.
We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.
Although he reputedly hated the label of ‘guru’, Peter Drucker was, by any standards, the greatest management guru the world has yet seen. In 1996, the McKinsey Quarterly journal described him as the ‘the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow’ and Robert Heller described him as ‘the greatest man in the history of management’, praise indeed for a man who described himself as ‘just an old journalist’.
Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant.
Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will... be taken over by a Central government...
We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad, ...We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order... We see change as being order itself--indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one.
Knowing Yourself ...We also seldom know what gifts we are not endowed with. We will have to learn where we belong, what we have to learn to get the full benefit from our strengths, where our weaknesses lie, what our values are. We also have to know ourselves temperamentally: "Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? What am I committed to? And what is my contribution?"
This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work... or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work - still abysmally low - will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people.
We do not need more laws. No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model.
If "socialism" is defined as "ownership of the means of production"--and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition--then the United States is the first truly Socialist country.
The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.
An organization belongs on a sick list when promotion becomes more important to its people than accomplishment of their job they are in. It is sick when it is more concerned with avoiding mistakes than with taking risks, with counteracting the weaknesses of its members than with building on their strength. But it is sick also when "good human relations" become more important than performance and achievement.
The postwar [WWII] GI Bill of Rights - and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans - signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century.
We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world.
As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it.
The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.
If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the "bourgeois" under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource.