The Daily Drucker: February 1 – Crossing the Divide

Crossing the divide into the new realities

Every few hundred years there occurs a sharp transformation.  We cross a “divide.”  Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself – its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structure, its arts, its key institutions,  Fifty years later, there is a new world.  The people born after the transformation cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born.

But today’s fundamental changes, these new realities visible thirty years ago, are actually only beginning and just about to have their full impacts.  They underlie the worldwide restructuring of businesses, large and small – mergers, divestitures, alliances.  They underlie the worldwide restructuring of the workforce – which, while largely an accomplished fact in the U.S., is still in its early stages in Japan & Europe.  And they underlie the need for the fundamental innovation in education and especially in higher education.  The realities are different from the issues on which politicians, economists, scholars, businessmen, and union leaders still fix their attention, still write books, still make speeches.

Quoted from The DailyDrucker, February 1, page 37