When the oracle speaks
D. Murali

He may be nearly 100 but when the management guru talks of technology, you'd better take note.

Managing in the Next Society:

IN about five years, Peter F. Drucker would be 100 years old. Yet, when he has something to say, corporate chiefs stop to listen. A collection of Drucker's articles is out in the form of a book titled "Managing in the Next Society", from Viva Books. It offers `searching analysis' of the information revolution and the knowledge society it has created. Management of an institution, whether a business, a university, a hospital, has to be grounded in basic and predictable trends that persist regardless of today's headlines. What are these `basic trends'? According to the guru, these are: "The global shrinking of the young population and the emergence of the new workforce; the steady decline of manufacturing as a producer of wealth and jobs; and the changes in the form, the structure, and the function of the corporation and of its top management." The book has interesting one-liners such as - "A change is something people do, and a fad is something people talk about". Here's more:


What we call the Information Revolution is actually a Knowledge Revolution. Software is the reorganisation of traditional work, based on centuries of experience, through the application of knowledge and especially of systematic, logical analysis. The key is not electronics; it is cognitive science.

The first management conference we know of was called in 1882 by the German Post Office. The topic - and only chief executive officers were invited - was how not to be afraid of the telephone. Nobody showed up. The invitees were insulted. The idea that they should use the telephones was unthinkable. The telephone was for underlings.

Traditional multinationals will, in time, be killed by e-commerce. The e-commerce delivery of goods, of services, of repairs, spare parts, and maintenance will require a different organisation from that of any multinational today. It will also require a different mind-set, a different top management, and in the end, different definitions of performance.

There are few unique technologies anymore.
Increasingly, the knowledge needed in a given industry comes out of some totally different technology with which, very often, the people in the industry are unfamiliar. No one in the telephone industry knew anything about fibreglass cables.

They were developed by a glass company, Corning. Conversely, more than half the important inventions developed since World War II by the most productive of the great research labs, the Bell Laboratories, have been applied mainly outside the telephone industry.


In businesses across the board, information technology has had an obvious impact. But until now that impact has been only on concrete elements - not intangibles like strategy and innovation. Thus, for the CEO, new information has had little impact on how he or she makes decisions. That is going to have to change.