Peter F. Drucker: Society

“If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total depression.”

Peter F. Drucker book Concept of the Corporation

Concept of the Corporation (1945)
compare Dwight Eisenhower's January, 1961 Farewell Speech
1930s- 1950s

War , Way , Suicide

“…all earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.”

Peter F. Drucker

The New Pluralism Leader to Leader, No. 14 (Fall 1999)
1990s and later

Communication

“Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order… catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 24

Men , Law , Nature

“This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work… or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work - still abysmally low - will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1990s and later, Managing in a Time of Great Change (1995), p. 205

People , Way , Knowledge , Dependency

“Political freedom is neither easy nor automatic, neither pleasant nor secure. It is the responsibility of the individual for the decisions of society as if they were his own decisions--as in moral truth and accountability they are.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Future of Industrial Man (1942), p. 115

Truth , Decision , Freedom

“Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 392

“We still think and talk of the basic problems of an industrial society as problems that can be solved by changing the system, that is the superstructure of political organization. Yet the real problems lie within the [industrial] enterprise. …our representative institution… a mirror in which we look when we want to see ourselves.”

Peter F. Drucker

1930s- 1950s, The New Society (1950)

Lie , Problem , Thinking , Change

“There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology, society, economy, and institutions.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 3, p. 803 (last page)

Change

“The postwar [WWII] GI Bill of Rights - and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans - signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century.
We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1990s and later, Post-Capitalist Society (1993), p. 3

World , History , Knowledge , Change

“[T]he enemy of totalitarian Nazism is not in the East. It is not Russian communism. The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxist socialism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, noneconomic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following… During the last few years Russia has therefore been forced to adopt one purely totalitarian and fascist principle after the other; not, it must be emphasized, because of a ‘Stalinist conspiracy,” but because there was no other possibility.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), pp. 245-246

Travel , Communication , Freedom

“We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Future of Industrial Man (1942), p. 96

Freedom

“That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society "post-capitalist.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1990s and later, Post-Capitalist Society (1993), p. 45

Knowledge

“The fundamental reality for every worker, from sweeper to executive vice-president, is the eight hours or so that he spends on the job. In our society of organizations, it is the job through which the great majority has access to achievement, to fulfillment, and to community.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 327

Communication , Reality

“Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 41

Business

“Unless we realize that the essence of Nazism is also an attempt to solve a universal problem of Western civilization - that of the industrial society - and that the basic principles on which the Nazis base this attempt are also in no way confined to Germany, we do not know what we fight for or what we fight against… The war is being fought for the structure of industrial society--its basic principles, its purposes, and its institutions.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Future of Industrial Man (1942), p. 107-108

War , Way , Problem , Universe

“…the information revolution. Almost everybody is sure …that it is proceeding with unprecedented speed; and …that its effects will be more radical than anything that has gone before. Wrong, and wrong again. Both in its speed and its impact, the information revolution uncannily resembles its two predecessors …The first industrial revolution, triggered by James Watt's improved steam engine in the mid-1770s…did not produce many social and economic changes until the invention of the railroad in 1829 …Similarly, the invention of the computer in the mid-1940s, …it was not until 40 years later, with the spread of the Internet in the 1990s, that the information revolution began to bring about big economic and social changes. …the same emergence of the “super-rich” of their day, characterized both the first and the second industrial revolutions. …These parallels are close and striking enough to make it almost certain that, as in the earlier industrial revolutions, the main effects of the information revolution on the next society still lie ahead.”

Peter F. Drucker

"The way ahead" Economist.com http://www.economist.com/ (November 2001)
1990s and later

Lie , Change , Speed

“No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Future of Industrial Man (1942), p. 28

Decision

“The citizen of today in every developed country is typically an employee. He works for one of the institutions. He looks to them for his livelihood. He looks to them for his opportunities. He looks to them for access to status and function in society, as well as for personal fulfillment and achievement.
The citizen of 1900 if employed worked for a small family-type operation; the small pop-and-mom store employing a helper or two; the family household; and so on. And of course, the great majority of people in those days, except in the most highly industrialized countries—such as Britain or Belgium—worked on the farm.
Our society has become an employee society. In the early 1900s people asked, “What do you do?””

Peter F. Drucker

Today they tend to ask, “Whom do you work for?”
Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), p. 4

People , Family , Moms , Personality

“The society of ]]organizations\\ is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 284

“Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior…”

Peter F. Drucker

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 37

Behavior , Freedom