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Managing in the Next Society by Peter F. Drucker Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Sampler Peter Drucker writes definitively on a wide range of topics, from business to economics to politics to society. A great way to enjoy Drucker is through the occasional collections of his essays and articles. The most recent compilation appears under the title Managing in the Next Society, and covers snippets of Drucker’s writing over the past five or six years. Every executive owes something to Drucker, and reading him often spurs thinking in directions that lead to personal and organizational changes. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter titled “It’s the Society, Stupid” about Japan from 1998: “Again the United States is the exception and Japan more nearly the rule. In most developed countries other than the United States, the economy is considered a restrain on policies rather than their major, let alone sole, determinant. Ideology and, above all, the impact on society come first. Even in the United States, the primacy of economics in public life and policy is fairly recent, dating no further back that World War II. Until then, the United States, too, tended to consider society first. Despite the Great Depression, the New Deal put social reform well ahead of economic recovery. America’s voters overwhelmingly approved. But while hardly uniquely Japanese, giving pride of place to society is more important to the Japanese than to most other developed countries, save perhaps France. To the outsider, Japan appears to have extraordinary social strength and cohesion. No other society in history has successfully met such extreme challenges and dislocations: say, the 180-degree turn forced on Japan by Commodore Perry’s black ships in the 1860s, as a result of which the world’s most isolated country, hermetically sealed for more than two centuries, opened itself to modernity overnight and became Westernized, or, equally traumatic, the radical social turnaround after its defeat in 1945 and the long years of foreign occupation thereafter. The Japanese, however, see their society as fragile. They know how close to collapse and civil war their country came both times; hence the extreme importance, for instance, of lifetime employment as Japan’s social glue. Whether Japanese society is hardy or delicate is beside the point. What matters is that the Japanese take its primacy for granted. If Americans understood this, especially in dealing with a Japan in trouble, they might cling less to myths about the uselessness of the Japanese bureaucracy. Defending the bureaucrats is still heresy, of course, but heresy is often closer to the truth than conventional wisdom.” All the essays in Managing in the Next Society pack a similar wallop: candid, direct, opinionated, and rarely conventional. While everything in Managing in the Next Society has been published previously, it’s helpful to sit down and see Drucker’s thinking pulled together in one place. Given all the economic changes of recent years, it’s sobering to hear Drucker’s opinion that social changes may be more important than economic changes. If he’s right, what will that mean for you and your organization. Read Managing in the Next Society so you can think about that. Steve Hopkins, October 23, 2002
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