Managing for the Future
Summary
This collects essays and articles Peter Drucker published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, mostly in the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, organised into sections on economics, people, management and the organisation.
The recurring themes are the ones Drucker developed at length elsewhere: the shift from manual to knowledge work and its consequences for management; the separation of the real economy from the symbol economy of capital and currency flows; the rise of institutional investors as owners and the governance problem that creates; the transformation of manufacturing toward flexible production; demographic change in developed countries; and the difficulty large organisations face in abandoning what has stopped working.
As with Drucker's other collections, the pieces were written separately and repeat each other. Their value is that each addresses a specific development of its moment, which makes the collection a record of how an acute observer read the period. Readers should note that this is journalism rather than sustained argument, and that the treatises state the same positions more completely. The essays on pension funds as owners and on the coming labour shortage were early and have held up.
Key takeaways 7
- Financial flows had become detached from trade in goods, and Drucker argued the symbol economy now moves independently of the real one.
- Pension funds became the owners of American business without acquiring any of the capabilities that ownership requires.
- Manufacturing was shifting from long production runs to flexible systems, which changes the economics of scale.
- Developed-country demographics guarantee labour shortages in specific skills regardless of aggregate unemployment.
- Organisations must build the abandonment of existing products and practices into their routine planning rather than treating it as a crisis response.
- Knowledge workers require management by objectives and self-control, because their supervisor usually cannot evaluate their work directly.
- Drucker argues that the corporation's obligations to employees and communities are conditions of its licence to operate rather than optional additions.
Who should read it
Readers already familiar with Drucker's framework who want his shorter pieces on the specific economic changes of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
About Peter F. Drucker
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.
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