The Daily Drucker: February 5 – Shrinking the Younger Population

The next society will be with us shortly.

In the developed countries, the dominant factor in the next society will be something to which most people are only just beginning to pay attention: the rapid growth of the older population and the rapid shrinking of the younger generation.  The shrinking of the younger population will cause an even greater upheaval than the growing number of older people, if only because nothing like this has happened since the dying centuries of the Roman Empire.  In every single developed country, but also in China and Brazil, the birth rate is now well below the replacement rate of 2.2 live births per woman of reproductive age.  Politically, this means that immigration will become an important – and highly divisive – issue in all rich countries.  It will cut across all traditional political alignments.

Economically, the decline in the younger population will change markets in fundamental ways.  Growth in family formation has been the driving force of all domestic markets in the developed world, but the rate of family formation is certain to fall steadily unless bolstered by large scale immigration of younger people.

ACTION POINT:  Determine whether your organization is betting on young people, older people, or immigrants.  Make sure you have a plan for the gradual decrease in the youth market and the increase in newcomers and the aged.

Managing in the Next Society

Quoted from The Daily Drucker, page 41

The Daily Drucker: February 4 – Knowledge and Technology

The new technology embraces and feeds off the entire array of human knowledges.

The search for knowledge, as well as the teaching thereof, has traditionally been dissociated from application.  Both have been organized by subject, that is, according to what appeared to be the logic of knowledge itself.  The faculties and departments of the university, its degrees, its specializations, indeed the entire organization of higher learning, have been subject-focused.  They have been, to use the language of the experts on organization, based upon “product” rather than “market” or “end use.”  Now we are increasingly organizing knowledge and the search for it around areas of application rather than around the subject areas of disciplines.  Interdisciplinary work has grown everywhere.

This is a symptom of the shift in the meaning of knowledge from an end in itself to a resource, that is, a means to some result.  Knowledge as the central energy of a modern society exists altogether in application and when it is put to work.  Work, however, cannot be defined in terms of the disciplines.  End results are interdisciplinary of necessity.

ACTION POINT: List results for which you are responsible. What specialists are you dependent on to get these results? How can you improve coordination among these specialists?

                                                                                                        The Age of Discontinuity

Quoted from The Daily Drucker, February 4, page 40

The Daily Drucker: February 3 – The Management Revolution

What matters is the productivity of non-manual workers.

In 1881, an American, Fredrick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), first applied the knowledge to the study of work, the analysis of work and the engineering of work.  This led to the productivity revolution.  The Productivity Revolution has become a victim of its own success.  From now on, what matters is the productivity of non-manual workers.  And that requires applying knowledge to knowledge.  

But knowledge is now also being applied systematically and purposefully to define what new knowledge is needed, whether it is feasible, and what has to be done to make knowledge effective.  It is being applied, in other words, to systematic innovation.  This third change in the dynamics of knowledge can be called Management Revolution.  Supplying knowledge to find out how existing knowledge can best be applied to produce results is, in effect, what we mean by management.

ACTION POINT: What results are you being paid to achieve?  List three tasks that you should eliminate to be productive.

                                                                                                                                                         Post-Capitalist Society

Quoted from The Daily Drucker, February 3, page 39

The Daily Drucker: February 2 – Face Reality

Exploit the new realities.

Today’s new realities fit neither the assumption of the Left nor those of the Right.  They don’t mesh at all with “what everybody knows.” They differ even more from what everybody, regardless of political persuasion, still believes reality to be.  “What is” differs totally from what both the Right and the Left believe “ought to be.”  The greatest and most dangerous turbulence today results from the collision between the delusions of the decision makers – whether in governments, in top managements of business, or in union – and the realities.

But a time of turbulence is also one of great opportunity for those who can understand, accept and exploit the new realities.  One constant theme is, therefore, the need for the decision maker in the individual enterprise to face up to the realities and resist the temptation of what “everybody knows,” the temptations of the certainties of yesterday, which are about to become the deleterious superstitions of tomorrow.  To manage in turbulent time, therefore, means to face up to the new realities.  It means starting with the questions: “What is the world really like?” rather than with the assertions and assumptions that made sense only a few years ago.

ACTION POINT: List three new opportunities created by demographic shifts – changes in the composition of the population and workforce – and the shift from national to regional to transnational economies.  Pursue them.

                                                                                                                   Managing in Turbulent Times

Quoted from The Daily Drucker, February 2, page 38

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