Reviews Amazon.com No single person has influenced the course of business in the 20th century as much as
Peter Drucker. He practically invented management as a discipline in the 1950s, elevating
it from an ignored, even despised, profession into a necessary institution that
"reflects the basic spirit of the modern age." Now, in Management Challenges
for the 21st Century, Drucker looks at the profound social and economic changes
occurring today and considers how management--not government or free markets--should
orient itself to address these new realities.
Drucker sees the period we're living in as one of "PROFOUND TRANSITION--and the
changes are more radical perhaps than even those that ushered in the 'Second Industrial
Revolution' of the middle of the 19th century, or the structural changes triggered by the
Great Depression and the Second World War." In the midst of all this change, he
contends, there are five social and political certainties that will shape business
strategy in the not-too-distant future: the collapsing birthrate in the developed world;
shifts in distribution of disposable income; a redefinition of corporate performance;
global competitiveness; and the growing incongruence between economic and political
reality. Drucker then looks at requirements for leadership ("One cannot manage
change. One can only be ahead of it"), the characteristics of the "new
information revolution" (one should focus on the meaning of information, not the
technology that collects it), productivity of the knowledge worker (unlike manual workers,
knowledge workers must be seen as capital assets, not costs), and finally the
responsibilities that knowledge workers must assume in managing themselves and their
careers.