Technology, Management and Society

190 Pages·2004·18.6 MB·English

by  Peter Drucker

Technology,
Management,
and Society
216x138 PB
BOOKS BY
PETER F. DRUCKER
Technology, Management, and Society
The Age of Discontinuity
The Effective Executive
Managing for Results
Landmarks of Tomorrow
The Practice of Management
The New Society
Big Business
The Future of Industrial Man
The End of Economic Man
Technology,
Management,
and Society
Essays by
PETER F. DRUCKER
i~ ~~~;~~n~~~up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published by Butterworth-Heinemann
This edition published 20 II by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OXI4 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint a/Taylor & Francis Group, an in/orma business
First published 1970
© Peter F, Drucker 1958, 1959, 1961, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970
Major portions of this work were previously published in Harvard Business
Review, Technology and Culture, Management Science, The Journal of
Business oft he University of Chicago, and The McKinsey Quarterly
Chapters I and 6 are reprinted from Management Today by permission of
Management Publications Ltd
Chapters 4 and 5 are reprinted from Technology in Western Civilization, volume
2, edited by Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. Copyright © 1967
by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin. Reprinted by permission of
Oxford University Press
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 Licensmg Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court
Road. London. England, WIP OLP. Applications for the copyright holder's written
permISsion to reproduce any part of this publicatIon should be addressed to the pubhsher
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 434 90396 5
Contents
Preface vli
1. Information, Communications, and Understanding 1
2. Management's New Role 21
3. Work and Tools 37
4. Technological Trends in the Twentieth Century 48
5. Technology and Society in the Twentieth Century 64
6. The Once and Future Manager 79
7. The First Technological Revolution and Its Lessons 99
8. Long-range Planning 109
9. Business Objectives and Survival Needs 126
10. The Manager and the Moron 141
11. The Technological Revolution: Notes on the Rela-
tionship of Technology, Science, and Culture 151
12. Can Management Ever Be a Science? 163
Index 171
Preface
There should be underlying unity to a collection of essays.
There should be a point of view, a central theme, an organ point
around which the whole volume composes itself. And there is, I
believe, such fundamental unity to this volume of essays, even
though they date from more than a dozen years ago and discuss
a variety of topics. One of the essays, 'Work and Tools,' states:
'Technology is not about tools, it deals with how Man works.'
This might be the device of this entire volume, if not, indeed, for
my entire work over the years.
All the essays in this volume deal with one or the other aspect
of what used to be called 'the material civilization': they all deal
with man's tools and his materials, with his institutions and
organizations, and with the way he works and makes his living.
But throughout, work and materials, organizations and a living
are seen as 'extensions of man', rather than as material artifacts
and part of inanimate nature. If I were to reflect on my own
position over the years, I would say that, from the very be
ginning, I rejected the common nineteenth-century view which
divided man's society into 'culture', dealing with ideas and sym
bols, and 'civilization', dealing with artifacts and things. 'Civi
lization' to me has always been a part of man's personality, and
an area in which he expressed his basic ideals, his dreams, his
aspirations, and his values. Some of the essays in this volume
are about technology and its history. Some are about manage
ment and managers. Some are about specific tools - the com
puter, for instance. But all of them are about man at work; all
are about man trying to make himself effective.
An essay collection, however, should also have diversity. It
should break an author's thought and work the way a prism
vili Pr~~e
breaks light. Indeed, the truly enjoyable essay collection is full
of surprises as the same author. dealing with very much the
same areas, is suddenly revealed in new guises and suddenly
reveals new facets of his subject. The essays collected in this
volume deal with only one of the major areas that have been of
concern to me - the area of the 'material civilization'. But there
is a good deal of variety in them. Five of the twelve essays in this
volume deal with technology. its history. and its impact on man
and his culture. They range in time. however, from a look at the
'first technological revolution'. seven thousand years ago, when
the irrigation cities created what we still call 'modem civi·
lization'. to an attempt to evaluate the position of technology in
our present century. They all assume that history cannot be
written, let alone make sense, unless it takes technology into
account and is aware of the development of man's tools and his
use of them through the ages. This, needless to say, is not a
position historians traditionally have held; there are only signs
so far that they are beginning to realize that technology has been
with us from the earliest date and has always been an intimate
and integral part of man's experience. man's society. and man's
history. At the same time, these essays all assume that the tech
nologist, to use his tools constructively. has to know a good deal
of history and has to see himself and his discipline in relation
ship to man and society - and that has been an even less popular
position among technologists than the emphasis on technology
has been among historians.
Four essays in this volume - the first two, the essay, 'The
Once and Future Manager', and the essay on 'Business Objec
tives and Survival Needs' - look upon the manager as the
agent of today's society and upon management as a central
social function. They assume that managers handle tools, as
sume that managers know their tools thoroughly and are willing
to acquire new ones as needed. But. above all, they ask the
question. 'What results do we expect from the manager; what
results does his enterprise. whether a business or a govern
ment agency, need from him? What results. above all, do our
society and the human beings that compose it have a right to
expect from a manager and from management?' The con
cern is with management as it affects the quality of life - that
Preface ix
management can provide the quantities of life is taken as proven.
The remaining three essays ('Long-range Planning', 'The
Manager and the Moron', and 'Can Management Ever Be a
Science?' deal with basic approaches and techniques. They are
focused on management within the enterprise rather than on
management as a social function. But they stress constantly the
purpose of management, which is not to be efficient but to be
productive, for the human being, for economy, for society.
An essay collection, finally, should convey the personality of
the author better than a book can. This is why I enjoy reading
essays. It should bring out a man's style, a man's wit, and the
texture of a man's mind. Whether this essay collection does this,
I leave to the reader to judge. But I do hope that these twelve
essays of mine, written for different purposes and at different
times since 1957, will also help to establish the bond between
author and writer, which, in the last analysis. is why a writer
writes and a reader reads.
PETER F. DRUCKER
Montclair, New Jersey
1. Information,
Communications,
and Understanding
CONCERN with 'information' and 'communications' started
shortly before World War I. Russell and Whitehead's Principia
Mathematica, which appeared in 1910, is still one of the foun~
dation books. And a long line of illustrious successors - from
Ludwig Wittgenstein through Norbert Wiener and A. N.
Chomsky's 'mathematical linguistics' today - has continued the
work on the logic of information. Roughly contemporaneous is
the interest in the meaning of communication; Alfred Korzybski
started on the study of 'general semantics'. i.e. on the meaning
of communications, around the turn of the century. It was
World War I, however. which made the entire Western world
communications-conscious. When the diplomatic documents of
1914 in the German and Russian achives were published,
soon after the end of the fighting. it became appallingly clear
that the catastrophe had been caused, in large measure, by com
munications failure despite copious and reliable information.
And the war itself - especially the total failure of its one and
only strategic concept, Winston Churchill's Gallipoli campaign
in 1915-16 - was patently a tragicomedy of noncommunica
tions. At the same time, the period immediately following World
War I - a period of industrial strife and of total non
communication between Westerners and 'revolutionary' Com-
Paper read before the Fellows of the International Academy of Manage
ment, Tokyo, Japan, October 1969. Published in Management Today, March
1970, as 'What Communication Means',