PREFACE

The Future Is Being Shaped Today

The thirty-seven chapters in this volume: an Interview, an Afterword, and thirty-five essays and articles, cover a broad range of subjects. Yet they were planned from the beginning to be published eventually in one volume and as variations on one unifying theme: the challenges of tomorrow that face the executive today. If there is one single postulate underlying these pieces, it is that the future is being made by totally anonymous people, a CEO here, a marketing manager there, a training director or a comptroller yonder doing mundane jobs: building a management team; developing a new pricing strategy; changing a training program so that it matches people with different educational backgrounds to new technologies; or working out a new cost-accounting analysis to find out whether automating the welding line will pay off.

This, after all, is the lesson of this century. It has been a century of unprecedented disasters and cataclysms: two world wars, a Stalin, a Hitler, a Mao, and scores of lesser but no less murderous villains. Indeed we packed into every decade as much “history” as one usually finds in a century; and little of it was benign. Yet most of this world, and especially the developed world, somehow managed not only to recover from the catastrophes again and again but to regain direction and momentum—economic, social, even political. The main reason was that ordinary people, people running the everyday concerns of everyday businesses and institutions, took responsibility and kept on building for tomorrow while all around them the world came crashing down. Thus tomorrow is being shaped today.

And what kind of tomorrow it will be thus depends heavily on the knowledge, insight, foresight, and competence of the decision makers of today, and especially of the decision makers in our institutions, that is, on executives. Yet these executives are busy people. Every one of them is already fully occupied with the daily crisis—and the daily crisis is indeed the one absolutely predictable event in the working day of the executive. To enable these busy people to see and to understand the long-range implications and impacts of their immediate, everyday, urgent actions and decisions is thus the purpose to which every one of the pieces in this volume addresses itself.

There is a second theme that runs through these thirty-seven diverse and different articles and essays: Change is opportunity. Every one of the pieces in this volume looks at changes. Some are profound and major ones, such as the impact of information on organization, the meaning of the U.S. entrepreneurial surge in the last decade, or the problems created by the success of management. Other changes are perhaps ephemeral and transitory—though for that matter no less important—for example, the mismatch between traditional jobs and the expectations and qualifications of a new, young, and educated work force. Every one of these changes might be seen as a threat and is indeed seen as such by a good many executives. Every one needs to be seen and exploited as an opportunity—for doing something different, for doing something new, and, above all, for doing something better, something more productive, something more profitable. This volume therefore aims not only at providing knowledge, insight, foresight, and competence; it aims at creating vision.

Peter F. Drucker

Claremont, California

Summer 1986