Peter F. Drucker - Peter F. Drucker on the Network Economy

All the pieces in this booktwo interviews, one at the beginning and one at the end, and the twenty-five chapters in between, have one common theme, despite their apparent diversity. They all deal with changes that have already irreversibly happened. They therefore deal with changes on which executives canindeed musttake action. None of the pieces in this book attempt to predict the future. All deal with what executives can dohave to doto make the future.

It is not so very difficult to predict the future. It is only pointless. Many futurologists have high batting averagesthe way they measure themselves and are commonly measured. They do a good job of foretelling some things. But what are always far more important are fundamental changes that happened though no one predicted them or could possibly have predicted them. Looking back ten years ago today, no one in 1985 predictedor could have predicted that the establishment of the European Economic Community would not release explosive economic growth in Europe but would, on the contrary, usher in a decade of economic stagnation and petty bickering. As a result, the unified Europe of 1995 is actually weaker in the world economy than was the fractured Europe of 1985. No one, ten years ago, predictedor could have predictedthe explosive economic growth of mainland China, a growth that came despite rather than because of its government policies. No one predicted the emergence of the 55 million overseas Chinese as the new economic superpower. No one ten years ago could have predicted that the biggest impact of the Information Revolution on business would be a radical rethinking and restructuring of the oldest information systemand one that apparently was ossified in every joint and tissuethe accounting model of the bean counters.

But equally important: one cannot make decisions for the future. Decisions are commitments to action. And actions are always in the present, and in the present only. But actions in the present are also the one and only way to make the future. Executives are paid to executethat is, to take effective action. That they can only do in contemplation of the present, and by exploiting the changes that have already happened.

This book starts out with the executives job, that is, with management. What has already happened in the world of the executive that puts into questionor perhaps even makes obsoletethe assumptions, rules, and practices that have worked these last forty years and that therefore have automatically been taken for granted? The book then proceeds to look at the implications of one particular fundamental change in management, economy, and society: the emergence of information as the executives key resource and as the organizations skeleton. The premise of this part of the book is the old adage that either you are the tools master or you are its servant. What do executives have to learn to be masters of the new tool? Then this book moves out of the executives job and organization into markets and into a world economy in which there are new power centers, new growth markets, new growth industries. In its last section the book analyzes the changes in society and governmentthe biggest changes, perhaps, in this century of social transformation, in which government has been both a great success and the ultimate failure.

Only thirtyperhaps even only twenty-fiveyears ago it was often said that while there were a great many more managers and executives than there had been in the 1920s (let alone before World War I), most of them were doing pretty much what their predecessors had done and in pretty much the same way. No one would say that anymore for todays managers and executives. But if there is one thing that is certain today, it is that tomorrows managers and executives will do things that are even more different from what todays managers and executives do. And they will do them quite differently. To enable todays executives to be ahead of this different tomorrowindeed to make it their tomorrowis the aim of the book.

Peter F. Drucker

Claremont, California

May 1995