Drucker, Peter
Drucker is a very prolific author, having published more than thirty books in his still active career. His first accounts of the importance of knowledge seem to have been made in The Landmarks of Tomorrow (1957). A more thorough analysis appeared in The Age of Discontinuity (1969), but the review here is mainly on his 1993 work, The Post-Capitalist Society, for its more focused and detailed approach to the issue.
Drucker’s argument is that knowledge has been the basis of capitalist society from the very beginning. The critical feature in the current revolution is that knowledge is now being applied to knowledge itself, instead of to tools and products, in the case of the industrial revolution of the 18th century, and to human work and production processes, as in the productivity revolution of the early 20th century. Management, to him, is essentially a knowledge work.
In the case of the post-capitalist society, the workers being managed are no longer manual workers, but knowledge workers. This requires a totally different approach to management, since the nature of knowledge work and the characteristics of the knowledge worker are completely different from manual labor and the manual worker. Among knowledge workers, Drucker distinguishes what he believes will be the largest type of them: a category he calls technologists, consisting of workers who deal with both manual and intellectual work. To increase the productivity of technologists, and of knowledge workers in general, is the greatest challenge for management in the 21st century.
Drucker (1969) described the shift from a society based on manual labor and skills to one based on knowledge work, along with its social, economical and political implications. He is probably the pioneer in using terms like knowledge society, knowledge economy, and knowledge worker.
Drucker strongly believes that a new society is forming. The main elements are:
- Changing
demographics. He writes frequently about the declining birthrate and
the aging of population. Implications are shrinkage of younger
workforce and the increasing availability of a post-retirement
part-time workforce.
- Steady decline of manufacturing.
Manufacturing as a source of wealth and employment is becoming marginal
in developed economies. Paradoxically, Drucker says it is becoming
politically more powerful at the same time.
- Emergence of a new, fragmented workforce.
- Changes in the structure and function of corporations.
- Globalization must be added.
Current
major social changes wil dominate the economic environment and demand
special attention from organizations in the next ten or fifteen years. BibliographyDrucker, P. F. (2002). Managing in the Next Society. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Drucker, P. F. (1993). The Post-Capitalist Society. New York: HarperBusiness.
Drucker, P. F. (1969). The Age of Discontinuity. London: Heinemann.
Notes05.4.23 - Drucker, 2002The
knowledge worker has more power to contribute or not to the
organization. More power to decide what and how he will contribute.
Current
management is obsessed with short term financial returns. The
accounting system is rotten.
Information
literacy instead of computer literacy. It is not about knowing how to
use computers, but to know what to do with it. What information is
needed, what for, the context. The metaphor is, e.g., not knowing to
operate a word processor, but to know what to write in a word
processor. And to use it not just for efficiency, but for more good
ideas.
We need information systems about the
outside, the environment. And not about customers, but about
non-customers.
There is a big trend towards outsourcing and temporary employees. Managing outsourced employees is a big business. Managing outsourced operations also.
The way to achieve leadership in knowledge-based businesses is to spend time with promissing knowledge professionals, to mentor them, to encourage them.
The emergence of knowledge work and of the knowledge worker will require new measurements, new policies, new practices, new values, new goals.
|
