Managing for the Future PDF
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Managing for the future Other Books by Peter F. Drucker MANAGEMENT Post-Capitalist Society Managing the Non-profit Organization The Frontiers of Management Innovation and Entrepreneurship The Changing World of the Executive Managing in Turbulent Times Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices The New Markets and Other Essays The Effective Executive Managing for Results The Practice of Management Concept of the Corporation ECONOMICS, POLITICS, SOCIETY The New Realities Toward the Next Economics The Unseen Revolution Men, Ideas and Politics The Age of Discontinuity The Landmarks of Tomorrow America's Next Twenty Years The New Society The Future of Industrial Man The End of Economic Man FICTION The Temptation to Do Good The Last of All Possible Worlds AUTOBIOGRAPHY Adventures of a Bystander MANAGING FOR THE F U T U RE Peter F. Drucker O Routledge §^^ Taylor &. Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published by Butterworth-Heinemann This edition published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business First published 1992 Paperback edition 1993 © Peter F.Drucker 1992 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright holder except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, England, W1P OLP. Applications for the copyright holder's written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN - 978 0 75060 909 8 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments x Interview: Notes on the Post-Business Society 1 PART I. ECONOMICS 1. The Futures Already Around Us 13 2. The Poverty of Economic Theory 22 3. The Transnational Economy 27 4. From World Trade to World Investment 32 5. The Lessons of the U.S. Export Boom 37 6. Low Wages: No Longer a Competitive Edge 42 7. Europe in the 1990s: Strategies for Survival 47 8. U.S.-Japan Trade Needs a Reality Check 52 9. Japan's Great Postwar Weapon 56 10. Misinterpreting Japan and the Japanese 61 11. Help Latin America and Help Ourselves 67 12. Mexico's Ace in the Hole: The Maquiladora 72 vi Contents PART II. PEOPLE 13. The New Productivity Challenge 79 14. The Mystique of the Business Leader 96 15. Leadership: More Doing Than Dash 100 16. People, Work, and the Future of the City 104 17. The Rise and Fall of the Blue-Collar Worker 109 18. On Ending Work Rules and Job Descriptions 114 19. Making Managers of Communist Bureaucrats 119 20. China's Nightmare: No Jobs for the Millions 124 PART III. MANAGEMENT 21. Tomorrow's Managers: The Major Trends 131 22. How to Manage the Boss 137 23. What Really Ails the U.S. Auto Industry 141 24. Manage by Walking Around—Outside! 146 25. Corporate Culture: Use It, Don't Lose It 150 26. Permanent Cost Cutting: Permanent Policy 155 27. What the Nonprofits Are Teaching Business 160 28. Nonprofit Governance: Lessons for Success 171 29. The Nonprofits' Outreach Revolution 180 PART IV. THE ORGANIZATION 30. The Governance of Corporations 187 31. Four Marketing Lessons for the Future 201 32. Tomorrow's Company: Dressed for Success 205 33. Company Performance: Five Telltale Tests 210 34. R&D: The Best Is Business-Driven 215 35. Sell the Mailroom: Unbundling in the '90s 220 36. The 10 Rules of Effective Research 224 37. The Trend Toward Alliances for Progress 229 38. A Crisis of Capitalism: Who's in Charge? 234 39. The Emerging Theory of Manufacturing 240 Afterword: The 1990s and Beyond 255 The Changing World Economy/The Knowledge Society/Innovation and Entrepreneurship/Personal Effectiveness Index 283 Preface About a year after my 1985 book, The Frontiers of Management, had come out, I received the following letter: "I am the CEO of a still fairly small but fast-growing specialty-chemicals company. I try to read five or six of your chapters every weekend, and ask my senior associates to do likewise. When I finish one of the chapters I then ask myself in writing: 'What does this chapter mean for me as a senior business executive? What does it mean for my colleagues on the management team? What does it mean for the company? What action does it imply - for me, the management team, the company? What opportunities does it identify for us? What changes in goals, strategies, policies, stnicture, might it point to?' We then discuss our respective answers at one of our management meetings. And six months later we discuss the same answers again to see what actions we have actually taken and how they have worked out, but also what actions we should have taken and might still undertake. Of course, a good many of your chapters do not directly apply to us; they lead to understanding rather than to action. But a good many, again and again, stimulate us to do something or to stop doing something. And the most valuable ones are the chapters that make me say: 'Of course, I have known this all along. Why haven't I acted on it?' " viii Preface The chapters in this book cover a wide range of topics, and they were written over a five-year period. The individual chapters were not "planned" to fill a spot on an outline sketched out five years ago. But each was most definitely designed from the beginning to address one of the dimensions of the executive's world: the economy and economics; people; management; organization - both outside and inside the executive's particular enterprise. In addition, each chapter was planned from the beginning to achieve two purposes. One: to explain to executives immersed in the demands of their own tasks and their own enterprise to understand the rapidly changing world in which they work and produce results. The other was to stimulate them to action and to provide tools for effective action. The executive's world has been turbulent for as long as I can remember - I started work two years before the 1929 crash! It surely has always been turbulent, but never as much as in these past few years - or in the years immediately ahead. Only a few short years ago, for instance, we worried about inflation and about the ascendancy of all kinds of new financial superpowers: global banks, transnational brokerage houses, junk-bond kings, takeover tycoons, and the like. Inflation is, of course, still a danger- and will remain one as long as governments pile up huge deficits. But executives in the '90s are more likely to be worried by financial stringencies and credit crunches - that is, by the typical deflation symptoms. The monetary giants of yesterday are everywhere in full retreat and mired in scandal. The international economy of 1992 also bears almost no resemblance to that of 1980 or 1981 (when Japan still ran a trade deficit, the European Economic Community was still pie in the sky, and lending billions to Brazilian generals still seemed to be the truly conservative thing to do). So, every chapter in this book tries to create understanding of what changes are ahead and what they mean for the economy, people, markets, the management, the organization. Every one of the chapters tries to create the understanding the executive needs to manage for tomorrow rather than for yesterday. But every chapter was also designed from the beginning to stimulate action - to identify new opportunities; to point out areas where changes - in process and product, policies, markets, and structure - might be needed; where and what to do and where and what to stop doing. The five years during which the chapters of this book were being Preface ix written were years of unprecedented political upheaval. The earliest chapter in this book was written in August 1986; in the same week I wrote the first draft of what was published - in early winter of 1989 - as Chapter 4 in my book The New Realities under the title 'When the Russian Empire Is Gone' - an essay in which I predicted the inevitable failure of Mr. Gorbachev's economic policies, the equally inevitable collapse of communism, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But the chapter I wrote that week for this book - it is Chapter 22 - bears the title 'How to Manage the Boss.' The most recently written chapter in this book, (Chapter 24), was done almost exactly five years later, in August 1991 in the week after the Communist hardliners putsch against Mr. Gorbachev had failed. Its title however is 'The New Japanese Business Strategies.' This book, in other words, focuses on executives, in their organizations and in their work. 'The show must go on' is its motto - and management's 'show' is effective action for results. To help executives act and to produce results, to help them perform - in a turbulent, dangerous, fast-changing economy, society, and technology - that is the purpose and mission of this book. Peter F. Drucker Claremont, California December 1991
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