Peter Drucker has a beautiful mind, forever fresh and overflowing with innovative thoughts. This book, published just as the master of management began his tenth decade of life, shows him at his perpetual best. The text carries with it the sweeping knowledge, deep experience, and astute analysis that a reader might expect from Drucker at this point in his life. But you will find no timid conservatism, no holding on to safe ground here. Drucker has made a lifelong habit of leading the way in business thought and this book confirms that he just can't help himself.
In contrast to the typical business book which is 200 pages too long, every chapter and every page of Management Challenges for the 21st Century relentlessly tweaks the noses of bad assumptions while focusing our attention on the future. Drucker pulls together diverse trends and forces to map out the truly new management challenges. His first chapter, "Management's New Paradigms" argues that organizations (or what ManyWorlds calls "business architecture") will have to become part of the executive's toolbox, yet we continue to operate on outdated assumptions about the role and domain of management.
Fortunately much recent management thinking explicitly challenges one assumption pulled apart by Drucker: The idea that the inside of the organization is the domain of management. This assumption, says Drucker, "explains the otherwise totally incomprehensible distinction between management and entrepreneurship". These are two aspects of the same task. Management without entrepreneurship (and vice versa) cannot survive in a world where every organization must be "designed for change as the norm and to create change rather than react to it."
Although Drucker is intent on uprooting old certainties and focusing organizations on constant change, he does not leave the reader without a compass. In the second chapter, "Strategy-The New Certainties", Drucker says that strategy allows an organization to be "purposefully opportunistic" and explains five certainties around we can shape our strategy. While other writers have addressed a couple of these, too little attention has been paid to some of the inevitabilities analyzed here, including the collapsing birthrate, shifts in the distribution of disposable income, and the growing incongruence between economic globalization and political splintering.
The book's third chapter, "The Change Leader", gives Drucker's unique perspective on the need for 21st organizations to be change leaders. "One cannot *manage* change. One can only be ahead of it." Change leaders have four qualities. They create policies to make the future which means not only continual improvement but *organized abandonment* - a practice still almost unknown in practice. Contrary to typical company reactions, change leaders will starve problems and feed opportunities. For Drucker this means, in part, having a policy of systematic innovation and - in tune with recent calls for new budgetary practices - having two separate budgets to ensure that the future-creating budget is not stopped off in difficult times.
Strong as the first chapters are, I found the other chapters of this book even more incisive. The reader may come away with the sense that many of Drucker's points are obvious, but will realize that they only *became* obvious after hearing them. In his chapter on "Information Challenges", Drucker gives his own, historically-rich, controversial, and provocative take on our current information revolution - the fourth such revolution, he says).
The man who coined the term "knowledge worker" has no shortage of fresh thoughts in the chapter on "Knowledge-Worker Productivity", and has profoundly important things to say in the final chapter on "Managing Oneself". Management Challenges for the 21st Century is, of course, essential reading for aspiring manager-entrepreneurs in these confusing times. As for aspiring business writers, I can only say: Read it and weep!
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