Peter F. Drucker on the 20 th Century

1. Peter F. Drucker on the 20th Century

2. Self and Community • “To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent. … The point of becoming a change agent is that it changes the mind-set of the entire organization. Instead of seeing change as a threat, its people will come to consider it an opportunity." (Drucker)

3. The Essential Drucker “To be sure, this century of ours may well have been the cruelest and most violent in human history, with its world wars and civil wars, its mass tortures, ethnic cleansings, and genocides. But all these killings, all these horrors inflicted on the human race by this century’s Weltbeglücker—those who establish paradise on earth by killing off nonconformists, dissidents, resisters, and innocent bystanders, whether Jews, the bourgeoisie, kulaks, or intellectuals— hindsight clearly shows, were just that: senseless killings, senseless horrors. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, the three evil geniuses of this century, destroyed. But they created nothing” (Drucker 35). http://web3.streamhoster.com/idstaff/pdf/ebookexcerpts/9780060010546.pdf

4. more of The Essential Drucker “One of the weaknesses of young, highly educated people today—whether in business, medicine, or government—is that they are satisfied to be versed in one narrow specialty and affect a contempt for the other areas. One need not know in detail what to do with “human relations” as an accountant, or how to promote a new branded product if an engineer. But one has a responsibility to know at least what these areas are about, why they are around, and what they are trying to do. One need not know psychiatry to be a good urologist. But one had better know what psychiatry is all about. One need not be an international lawyer to do a good job in the Department of Agriculture. But one had better know enough about international politics not to do international damage through a parochial farm policy” (Drucker 30).

5. Even more “The industrial worker needed the capitalist infinitely more than the capitalist needed the industrial worker—the basis for Marx’s assertion that there would always be a surplus of industrial workers, and an “industrial reserve army” that would make sure that wages could not possibly rise above the subsistence level (probably Marx’s most egregious error). In the knowledge society the most probable assumption—and certainly the assumption on which all organizations have to conduct their affairs—is that they need the knowledge worker far more than the knowledge worker needs them” (Drucker 47).

6. Drucker, Peter F. The Essential Drucker. HarperCollins, 2001.