Management Challenges for the 21st Century

Peter Drucker wrote this at eighty-nine as a statement of which management assumptions had stopped being true. He argues that the discipline's inherited beliefs were formed for a specific set of conditions and that most of those conditions had changed.

The assumptions he attacks include: that management applies only to business, that there is one right organisational structure, that there is one right way to manage people, that technologies and end-uses are fixed and given, that management's scope is legally defined by the corporation, and that its scope is politically defined by the nation state. Against each he sets a replacement, most importantly that management must be defined by the whole economic process rather than by legal ownership, and that different groups of workers require different forms of management within the same organisation.

The chapters that have proved most durable are the ones on knowledge worker productivity and on managing oneself. Drucker argues that raising knowledge worker productivity is the central management task of the century, that it requires asking what the task is rather than how to do it faster, and that knowledge workers must be treated as volunteers because they own the means of production. The chapter on managing oneself, which asks the reader to identify how they learn, whether they read or listen, and what their values are, has been reprinted separately more than anything else Drucker wrote. The predictions about demographics and about the fragmentation of the corporation were early and largely correct; the chapter on the change leader is thinner.

Management writer and consultant; professor at Bennington, NYU and Claremont Graduate University

He invented management as a field of study, and The Practice of Management and The Effective Executive remain the primary sources every later writer builds on.

NYU, Claremont Graduate University