In an age in which the average tenure of CEOs has shrunk to about five years, and theories about how to manage successfully through economic turmoil have the lifespan of a tsetse fly, it is interesting to reflect on the amazingly prophetic writings of Peter Drucker who died nearly four years ago at the age of 95. Drucker, considered the father of modern management, in a Harvard Business Review article published in 1993, wrote this:
Peter Drucker
“Every few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred. In a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself–its world view, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Forty years later a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. Our age is such a period of transformation.”
“In this society,” he continued, “knowledge is the primary resource for individuals and for the economy overall. Specialized knowledge by itself produces nothing. It can become productive only when it is integrated into a task. The purpose and function of every organization, business and nonbusiness alike, is the integration of specialized knowledge into a common task.”
The issues, according to Drucker, are: “Society, community, and family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability and to prevent, or at least to slow, change. But the modern oranization is a destabilizrer. It must be organized for innovation , the systematic abandonment of whatever is established, customary familiar, and comfortable.”
“It is the nature of knowledge,” he observed, “that it changes fast and that today’s certainties always become tomorrow’s absurdities.”