Peter F. Drucker (1909 – 2005)
Austrian-born American writer, management consultant and university professor.
All economic activity is by definition "high risk." And defending yesterday--that is, not innovating--is far more risky than making tomorrow.
In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers, is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power.
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.
I would hope that American managers - indeed, managers worldwide - continue to appreciate what I have been saying almost from day one: that management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege, that it is much more than "making deals." Management affects people and their lives.
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 purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.
As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it.
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.
With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe.
Ideas are somewhat like babies--they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, "This is a damn-fool idea." Instead they ask, "What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?"
A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.
The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.
If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total depression.
Wherever an impact can be eliminated by dropping the activity that causes it, this is therefore the best-indeed the only truly good-solution.
The subordinate's job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual.
That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society "post-capitalist.
The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.
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.
We do not need more laws. No country suffers from a shortage of laws. We need a new model.
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.