The Changing World of the Executive
Summary
The reference has not verified this book in detail; the summary states only what the title, author and subject establish.
Peter Drucker collected these essays and columns, mostly written for the Wall Street Journal, in 1982. They address the changing conditions under which executives worked at the start of the 1980s.
The subjects include the emergence of institutional investors as the owners of American corporations and the governance questions that raised, the effects of demographic change on labour markets and on pensions, the internationalisation of business and the emergence of production sharing across borders, the management of the growing service sector, executive compensation and its relationship to organisational cohesion, and the changing relationship between business and government.
As with Drucker's other collections, the pieces were written separately for a newspaper audience and repeat each other. They are shorter and more topical than the material in his books. The essays on pension fund ownership and on demographic change were early and have held up; the topical pieces on specific economic conditions of the period have not. Readers wanting Drucker's arguments should go to the books rather than the collections.
Key takeaways 6
- Pension funds had become the legal owners of American corporations without any capacity to exercise ownership.
- Demographic change was the most predictable of the forces acting on business, and Drucker treated it as already determined.
- Production sharing across borders was reorganising manufacturing before the vocabulary of global supply chains existed.
- Executive compensation ratios affect organisational cohesion, and Drucker argued that a wide gap destroys the willingness to be led.
- Service sector productivity was the coming management problem and no method for raising it existed.
- Drucker argues that executives should manage for the long term precisely because the short term is what institutional pressure supplies.
Who should read it
Readers of Drucker who want his shorter topical pieces from the early 1980s, though the books state his arguments more fully.
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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