Peter Ferdinand Drucker

Knowledge-worker productivity: the biggest challenge

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Social innovation—Management's new dimension

Abstract This Afterword is the final chapter in the authors recently published book of essays on the challenges of tomorrow that face the executive today. The future is in the hands of executives who are already fully occupied with the daily crisis. They need to understand the long-range implications and impacts of their immediate, everyday, urgent actions and decisions in relation to the far-reaching social innovations now taking place which are managements new and most significant dimension.

Future of management

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The First Technological Revolution and Its Lessons

Aware that we are living in the midst of a technological revolution, we are becoming increasingly concerned with its meaning for the individual and its impact on freedom, on society, and on our political institutions. Side by side with messianic promises of utopia to be ushered in by technology, there are the most dire warnings of mans enslavement by technology, his alienation from himself and from society, and the destruction of all human and political values. Tremendous though todays technological explosion is, it is hardly greater than the first great revolution technology wrought in human life seven thousand years ago when the first great civilization of man, the irrigation civilization, established itself. First in Mesopotamia, and then in Egypt and in the Indus Valley, and finally in China there appeared a new society and a new polity: the irrigation city, which then rapidly became the irrigation empire. No other change in mans way of life and in his making a living, not even the changes under way today, so completely revolutionized human society and community. In fact, the irrigation civilizations were the beginning of history, if only because they brought writing. The age of the irrigation civilization was pre-eminently an age of technological innovation. Not until a historical yesterday, the eighteenth century, did technological innovations emerge which were comparable in their scope and impact to those early changes in technology, tools, and processes. Indeed, the technology of man remained essentially unchanged until the eighteenth century insofar as its impact on human life and human society is concerned.

Science and Industry, Challenges of Antagonistic Interdependence

No one is responsible for the disenchantment of American science with its customers, government and industry, and of the customers with science. But the estrangement that has replaced the earlier relationship of mutual respect, while dangerous to both sides, is a mortal threat to American science.

A Key to American Politics: Calhoun's Pluralism

The American party system has been under attack almost continuously since it took definite form in the time of Andrew Jackson. The criticism has always been dircted at the same point: Americas political pluralism, the distinctively American organization of government by compromise of interests, pressure groups and sections. And the aim of the critics from Thaddeus Stevens to Henry Wallace has always been to substitute for this “unprincipled” pluralism a government based as in Europe on “ideologies” and “principles.” But never before—at least not since the Civil War years—has the crisis been as acute as in this last decade; for the political problems which dominate our national life today: foreign policy and industrial policy, are precisely the problems which interest and pressure-group compromise is least equipped to handle. And while the crisis symptoms: a left-wing Thirl Party and the threatened split-off of the Southern Wing, are more alarming in the Democratic Party, the Republicans are hardly much better off. The 1940 boom for the “idealist” Wilkie and the continued inability to attract a substantial portion of the labor vote, are definite signs that the Republican Party too is under severe ideological pressure.

Labor in Industrial Society

N EVER before, it seems, has organized labor been as strong, as powerful, and as accepted, in this country, as today. Yet the American labor movement faces its most serious crisis. It is a crisis of success, not of failurebut that may make it all the more severe. Our union leaders still live in the days when they had to fight for recognition if not for existence But the problems they really face are those of labor’s power and responsibility as a ruling group in industrial society. True to the traditions of this coun-

Big Business: Private Enterprise, Public Service

This is the third in a series of articles by Peter F. Drucker, professor of management at New York University. The one thing’ about the post-war period that is least surprising is that it has been a period full ~ of surprises. No matter how much the world has changed, it is still, obviously, true that the future always is different from what even the wisest expect. And every single feature of the world-landscape, is quite different from what anybody in 1945 predicted, whether he was optimist or pessimist, a champion of freedom or a totalitarian.

Big Business and Public Policy

Peter F. Drucker is a man of many parts. Originally trained in constitutional law, he has been a journalist, teacher, management consultant, economist, prolific author and public speaker. Currently professor of management at New York University, he was Filene lecturer at Roosevelt University last Spring. This is the first of three articles by Dr. Drucker in this journal. These articles carry the substance of his lectures at Roosevelt. In the last months of the Eisenhower Administration, the Ford Motor Company offered to buy out the English minority stockholders of its British subsidiary for some 350 million dollars. Just