PREFACE
All the pieces in this book—two 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 can—indeed must—take action. None of the pieces in this book attempt to predict the future. All deal with what executives can do—have to do—to make the future.
It is not so very difficult to predict the future. It is only pointless. Many futurologists have high batting averages—the 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 predicted—or 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, predicted—or could have predicted—the 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 system—and one that apparently was ossified in every joint and tissue—the 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 execute—that 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 executive’s job, that is, with management. What has already happened in the world of the executive that puts into question—or perhaps even makes obsolete—the 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 executive’s key resource and as the organization’s skeleton. The premise of this part of the book is the old adage that either you are the tool’s 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 executive’s 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 government—the biggest changes, perhaps, in this century of social transformation, in which government has been both a great success and the ultimate failure.
Only thirty—perhaps even only twenty-five—years 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 today’s managers and executives. But if there is one thing that is certain today, it is that tomorrow’s managers and executives will do things that are even more different from what today’s managers and executives do. And they will do them quite differently. To enable today’s executives to be ahead of this different tomorrow—indeed to make it their tomorrow—is the aim of the book.
Peter F. Drucker
Claremont, California
May 1995