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Managing in the Next Society (by Peter Drucker)

managing in the next society

Amazon Link: Managing in the Next Society

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Preface

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.

Peter F. Drucker
Claremont, California
Easter 2002


  • Managing in the Next Society (by Peter Drucker)
    • Preface
    • The Information society
      • Beyond the Information Revolution
        • The railroad
        • Routinization
        • The meaning of E-Commerce
        • Luther, Machiavelli, and the Salmom
        • The gentleman versus the technologist
        • Bribing the knowledge worker
      • The Exploding World of the Internet
      • From Computer Literacy to Information Literacy
      • E-Commerce: The Central Challenge
        • Cars by e-mail
      • The New Economy Isn't Here Yet
      • The CEO in the New Millennium
        • Transforming governance
        • New approaches to information
        • Command-and-control
        • The rise of knowledge work
        • Tying it together
    • Business opportunities
      • Entrepreneurs and Innovation
        • The four entrepreneurial pitfalls
        • Can large companies foster entrepreneurship?
        • The rise of social entrepreneurship
      • They're Not Employees, They're People
        • Strangled in red tape
        • The splintered organization
        • Companies don't get it
        • The key to competitive advantage
        • Free managers—to manage people
      • Financial Services: Innovate or Die
        • A wider transformation
        • Time for innovations
      • Moving Beyond Capitalism?
        • Capitalism vs. free markets. The civil society (taking action to improve the lives of others)
        • The Asian crisis
        • On Japan
        • On China
    • The changing world economy
      • The Rise of the Great Institutions
        • Control over the Fief
        • Needed autonomy
      • The Global Economy and the Nation-State
        • A true survivor
        • The nation-state afloat
        • Virtual money
        • Breaking the rules
        • Selling to the world
        • War after global economics
      • It's the Society, Stupid
        • A heretics' view
        • Descending from heaven
        • Elites rule
        • A policy about nothing
        • The social contract
        • It's the society, stupid
      • On Civilizing the City
        • Reality of rural life
        • The need for community
    • The next society (From The Economist)
      • Knowledge is all
      • The new protectionism
      • The future of the corporation
      • The new demographics
        • Needed but unwanted
        • A country of immigrants
        • The end of the single market
        • Beware demographic changes
      • The new workforce
        • His and hers
        • Ever upward
        • The price of success
      • The manufacturing paradox
        • Smaller numbers, bigger clout
      • Will the corporation survive?
        • Everything in its place
        • Who needs a research lab?
        • The next company
        • From corporation to confederation
        • The Toyota way
      • The future of top management
        • Life at the top
        • Impossible jobs
      • The way ahead
        • The future corporation
        • People policies
        • Outside information
        • Change agents
        • And then?
          • Big ideas
    • Acknowledgments
    • Index

Changing Social and Economic Picture

 









Peter Drucker: Conceptual Resources

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

unimagined futures

pyramid to dna

Toward unimagined futures

bbx 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)

bbx Landmarks of Tomorrow (1957)

bbx The Age of Discontinuity (1968)

bbx The New Realities (1988)

bbx Post-Capitalist Society (1993)

bbx 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

bbx Concept of the Corporation

bbx Practice of Management

bbx Managing for Results

bbx Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

bbx Innovation and Entrepreneurship

bbx The Essential Drucker (An introduction to management)

bbx Managing the Non-Profit Organization

bbx Management, Revised Edition

bbx Management Cases (Revised Edition)

bbx The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization

“Time Related” Management Books

bbx Managing in Turbulent Times

bbx The Changing World of The Executive

bbx Frontiers of Management

bbx Managing for the Future

bbx Managing in a Time of Great Change

bbx Management Challenges for the 21st Century

bbx Managing in the Next Society

Individually Aimed Books by Drucker

bbx Managing Oneself

bbx The Effective Executive

bbx The Effective Executive in Action

bbx What Executives Should Remember (a valuable summary of several core concepts)

bbx The Daily Drucker (an introduction to broad range of his thoughts)

The Daily Drucker table of contents worksheet

bbx Drucker on Asia — A Dialogue Between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi

bbx Adventures of a Bystander

Books about Drucker and his ideas

bbx The Definitive Drucker

Inside Drucker's Brain

bbx A Class With Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher

bbx Drucker on Leadership: New Lessons from the Father of Modern Management

bbx The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy

bbx 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?

bbx Technology, Management and Society

bbx Men, Ideas & Politics

bbx Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays

bbx The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition


Brainscape enhancement and topic assessment

Donation: Click the button below to make a donation through PayPal. Just a few dollars helps with the books, software, web site hosting, and the time devoted to enhancing the work approach blue print available on this site. See the text site map for a view of the site's unique scope and resources. Also see links to external resources on my delicious page

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Radar: attention :: enhancement :: organization

Conceptual resource assistance available


At the present time this is a prototype site. I add, remove, and redesign content based on my own unfolding comprehension of the time-life navigation © (TLN) landscape . This means that you might want to periodically revisit relevant pages.

Site design goals (beta—September 2010): My minimum goal is to provide enough "sign-posts" that serious site users don't find themselves in major negative situations because they didn't get the TLN memo. My desired goal is to provide "sign-posts" to a meaningful life—both for individuals and society. One supreme sign-post is to set your sights on achievements that really matter, that will make a difference in the world. The second half of your life is the major opportunity for full effectiveness and fulfillment.

Many of the books that were available when I first started working on what I now call "time-life navigation" have gone out of print or are hard to find. You can still use the content of the book outline pages to identify topics of interest and to search Amazon Books for topics or phrases.


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