I did once believe in a New Economy.
The year was 1929 and I was a trainee in the European headquarters of a major Wall Street firm.
My boss, the firm's European economist, was convinced that the Wall Street boom would go on forever; he wrote a brilliant book entitled Investment to prove "conclusively" that buying American common stock was the one absolutely foolproof way to get rich quick.
Being the firm's youngest trainee—I was not yet twenty—I was recruited to be my boss's research assistant, the book's proofreader, and its index-maker.
The book was published two days before the New York stock market crash and disappeared without a trace—and a few days later, so did my job.
And so, when seventy years later, in the mid-1990s, there was all that talk of the New Economy and of a perpetual stock market boom, I had been there before.
The terms that the 1990s used were, of course, different from those of the 1920s—we then talked of "perpetual prosperity" rather than a New Economy.
But only the terms were different; everything else, the arguments, the logic, the predictions, the rhetoric, was practically the same.
But at the time when everyone began to talk of the New Economy, I became aware that Society was changing, and more and more so as the decade progressed.
It was changing fundamentally and not only in the developed countries, but in the emerging ones perhaps even more.
The Information Revolution was only one factor, and perhaps not even the most potent one.
Demographics were at least as important, especially the steadily falling birthrates in the developed and emerging countries with a resulting fast shrinkage in the number and proportion of younger people and in the rate of family formation.
And while the Information Revolution was but the culmination of a trend that had been running for more than a century, the shrinkage of the young population was a total reversal and unprecedented.
But there is also another total reversal, the steady decline of manufacturing as a provider of wealth and jobs to the point where, economically, manufacturing is becoming marginal in developed countries but, at the same time, in a seeming paradox, politically all the more powerful.
There is—again unprecedented—the transformation of the workforce and its splintering.
These changes, together with the social impacts of the Information Revolution, are the main themes of this book—and these changes have already happened.
Irreversibly, the Next Society is already here.
Some of the chapters in this book deal with traditional "management" topics, some do not.
And none deals with the "cure-alls," the assertedly "infallible" tools and techniques that provided much of the substance for so many of the management best-sellers of the 1980s and 1990s.
Yet this is very much a book for executives and indeed very much a book about managing.
For the thesis that underlies all the book's chapters is that major social changes that are creating the Next Society will dominate the executive's task in the next ten or fifteen years—maybe even longer.
They will be the major threats and the major opportunities for every organization, large or small, business or nonprofit, American—North and South, European, Asian, Australian.
Indeed it is the thesis underlying every chapter of this book that the social changes may be more important for the success or failure of an organization and its executives than economic events.
For half a century, from 1950 to the 1990s, enterprises in the free, noncommunist world and their executives could and did take society very much for granted.
There were rapid and profound economic and technological changes.
But society was very much a given.
Economic and technological changes will surely continue.
Indeed the concluding pages of this book—the section "The Way Ahead" in Part TV—argues that major new technologies are still ahead of us, and that most of them, with high probability, will have nothing or little to do with information.
But to be able to exploit these changes as opportunities for the enterprise—again, for both businesses and nonprofits, whether large or small executives will have to understand the realities of the Next Society and will have to base their policies and strategies on them.
To help them do this, to help them successfully manage in the Next Society, is the purpose of this book.
All the chapters in this book were written before the terrorist attacks on America in September of 2001.
All but two of them (chapters 8 and 15) were actually published before September 2001 and no attempt has been made to update the chapters.
(*The year of first publication is shown at the end of each chapter.)
Except for a few small cuts and corrections of typographical and spelling errors (and, in a few cases, changing the title back to my original title) each chapter is being published as it originally appeared.
This means, specifically, that "three years ago" in a chapter first published in 1999 refers to the year 1996; a sentence in the same chapter reading "three years hence" refers to the year 2002.
This will also enable the reader to judge whether this author's anticipations and forecasts came true or were disproven by events.
The terrorist attacks of September 2001 should make this book even more relevant to the executive, and even more timely.
Terrorists and America's response to them have profoundly changed world politics.
We clearly face years of world disorder, especially in the Mideast.
But in a period of unrest and rapid changes such as we surely face, one cannot successfully manage by being clever.
Management of an institution, whether a business, a university, a hospital, has to be grounded in basic and predictable trends that persist regardless of today's headlines.
It has to exploit these trends as opportunities.
And these basic trends are the emergence of the Next Society and its new, and unprecedented, characteristics, especially the global shrinking of the young population and the emergence of the new workforce; the steady decline of manufacturing as a producer of wealth and jobs; and the changes in the form, the structure, and the function of the corporation and of its top management.
In times of great uncertainty and unpredictable surprises, even basing one's strategy and one's policies on these unchanging and basic trends does not automatically mean success.
But not to do so guarantees failure.
about Peter Drucker — a political social ecologist
Combined outline of Drucker's books — useful for topic searching.
Process: find topic; get Kindle version; word search; dictate notes to voice recognition software (Dragon NS or smart phone); calendarize
Invent Radium or I'll Pull Your Hair by Doris Drucker
Most of the following contain interesting introductions and prefaces with key strategic concepts. Reading through a book's index is a valuable use of time.
Toward tomorrows
Toward unimagined futures
The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939)
The Future of Industrial Man (1943)
The New Society: The Anatomy of Industrial Order (1950)
Landmarks of Tomorrow (1957)
The Age of Discontinuity (1968)
The New Realities (1988)
Post-Capitalist Society (1993)
Managing in the Next Society (2002); Last section originally published earlier in The Economist (http://economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=770819)
Comprehensive Management Books
Concept of the Corporation
Practice of Management
Managing for Results
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
The Essential Drucker (An introduction to management)
Managing the Non-Profit Organization
Management, Revised Edition
Management Cases (Revised Edition)
The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization
“Time Related” Management Books
Managing in Turbulent Times
The Changing World of The Executive
Frontiers of Management
Managing for the Future
Managing in a Time of Great Change
Management Challenges for the 21st Century
Managing in the Next Society
Individually Aimed Books by Drucker
Managing Oneself
The Effective Executive
The Effective Executive in Action
What Executives Should Remember (a valuable summary of several core concepts)
The Daily Drucker (an introduction to broad range of his thoughts)
The Daily Drucker table of contents worksheet
Drucker on Asia — A Dialogue Between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi
Adventures of a Bystander
Books about Drucker and his ideas
The Definitive Drucker
Inside Drucker's Brain
A Class With Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher
Drucker on Leadership: New Lessons from the Father of Modern Management
The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy
The Drucker Difference
Drucker Essay Collections
Although written years ago, these essays can be valuable attention directing tools. They can take your brain to places (brain addresses and brain roads) it wouldn't naturally go. What has changed and what is likely to change?
Technology, Management and Society
Men, Ideas & Politics
Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays
The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition
for topics or phrases.