Technology, Management, and Society 216x138 PB BOOKS BY PETER F. DRUCKER Technology, Management, and Society The Age of Discontinuity The Effective Executive Managing for Results Landmarks of Tomorrow The Practice of Management The New Society Big Business The Future of Industrial Man The End of Economic Man Technology, Management, and Society Essays by PETER F. DRUCKER i~ ~~~;~~n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published by Butterworth-Heinemann This edition published 20 II by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OXI4 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint a/Taylor & Francis Group, an in/orma business First published 1970 © Peter F, Drucker 1958, 1959, 1961, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970 Major portions of this work were previously published in Harvard Business Review, Technology and Culture, Management Science, The Journal of Business oft he University of Chicago, and The McKinsey Quarterly Chapters I and 6 are reprinted from Management Today by permission of Management Publications Ltd Chapters 4 and 5 are reprinted from Technology in Western Civilization, volume 2, edited by Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. Copyright © 1967 by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing in any medIUm by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright holder except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensmg Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road. London. England, WIP OLP. Applications for the copyright holder's written permISsion to reproduce any part of this publicatIon should be addressed to the pubhsher British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 434 90396 5 Contents Preface vli 1. Information, Communications, and Understanding 1 2. Management's New Role 21 3. Work and Tools 37 4. Technological Trends in the Twentieth Century 48 5. Technology and Society in the Twentieth Century 64 6. The Once and Future Manager 79 7. The First Technological Revolution and Its Lessons 99 8. Long-range Planning 109 9. Business Objectives and Survival Needs 126 10. The Manager and the Moron 141 11. The Technological Revolution: Notes on the Rela- tionship of Technology, Science, and Culture 151 12. Can Management Ever Be a Science? 163 Index 171 Preface There should be underlying unity to a collection of essays. There should be a point of view, a central theme, an organ point around which the whole volume composes itself. And there is, I believe, such fundamental unity to this volume of essays, even though they date from more than a dozen years ago and discuss a variety of topics. One of the essays, 'Work and Tools,' states: 'Technology is not about tools, it deals with how Man works.' This might be the device of this entire volume, if not, indeed, for my entire work over the years. All the essays in this volume deal with one or the other aspect of what used to be called 'the material civilization': they all deal with man's tools and his materials, with his institutions and organizations, and with the way he works and makes his living. But throughout, work and materials, organizations and a living are seen as 'extensions of man', rather than as material artifacts and part of inanimate nature. If I were to reflect on my own position over the years, I would say that, from the very be ginning, I rejected the common nineteenth-century view which divided man's society into 'culture', dealing with ideas and sym bols, and 'civilization', dealing with artifacts and things. 'Civi lization' to me has always been a part of man's personality, and an area in which he expressed his basic ideals, his dreams, his aspirations, and his values. Some of the essays in this volume are about technology and its history. Some are about manage ment and managers. Some are about specific tools - the com puter, for instance. But all of them are about man at work; all are about man trying to make himself effective. An essay collection, however, should also have diversity. It should break an author's thought and work the way a prism vili Pr~~e breaks light. Indeed, the truly enjoyable essay collection is full of surprises as the same author. dealing with very much the same areas, is suddenly revealed in new guises and suddenly reveals new facets of his subject. The essays collected in this volume deal with only one of the major areas that have been of concern to me - the area of the 'material civilization'. But there is a good deal of variety in them. Five of the twelve essays in this volume deal with technology. its history. and its impact on man and his culture. They range in time. however, from a look at the 'first technological revolution'. seven thousand years ago, when the irrigation cities created what we still call 'modem civi· lization'. to an attempt to evaluate the position of technology in our present century. They all assume that history cannot be written, let alone make sense, unless it takes technology into account and is aware of the development of man's tools and his use of them through the ages. This, needless to say, is not a position historians traditionally have held; there are only signs so far that they are beginning to realize that technology has been with us from the earliest date and has always been an intimate and integral part of man's experience. man's society. and man's history. At the same time, these essays all assume that the tech nologist, to use his tools constructively. has to know a good deal of history and has to see himself and his discipline in relation ship to man and society - and that has been an even less popular position among technologists than the emphasis on technology has been among historians. Four essays in this volume - the first two, the essay, 'The Once and Future Manager', and the essay on 'Business Objec tives and Survival Needs' - look upon the manager as the agent of today's society and upon management as a central social function. They assume that managers handle tools, as sume that managers know their tools thoroughly and are willing to acquire new ones as needed. But. above all, they ask the question. 'What results do we expect from the manager; what results does his enterprise. whether a business or a govern ment agency, need from him? What results. above all, do our society and the human beings that compose it have a right to expect from a manager and from management?' The con cern is with management as it affects the quality of life - that Preface ix management can provide the quantities of life is taken as proven. The remaining three essays ('Long-range Planning', 'The Manager and the Moron', and 'Can Management Ever Be a Science?' deal with basic approaches and techniques. They are focused on management within the enterprise rather than on management as a social function. But they stress constantly the purpose of management, which is not to be efficient but to be productive, for the human being, for economy, for society. An essay collection, finally, should convey the personality of the author better than a book can. This is why I enjoy reading essays. It should bring out a man's style, a man's wit, and the texture of a man's mind. Whether this essay collection does this, I leave to the reader to judge. But I do hope that these twelve essays of mine, written for different purposes and at different times since 1957, will also help to establish the bond between author and writer, which, in the last analysis. is why a writer writes and a reader reads. PETER F. DRUCKER Montclair, New Jersey 1. Information, Communications, and Understanding CONCERN with 'information' and 'communications' started shortly before World War I. Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, which appeared in 1910, is still one of the foun~ dation books. And a long line of illustrious successors - from Ludwig Wittgenstein through Norbert Wiener and A. N. Chomsky's 'mathematical linguistics' today - has continued the work on the logic of information. Roughly contemporaneous is the interest in the meaning of communication; Alfred Korzybski started on the study of 'general semantics'. i.e. on the meaning of communications, around the turn of the century. It was World War I, however. which made the entire Western world communications-conscious. When the diplomatic documents of 1914 in the German and Russian achives were published, soon after the end of the fighting. it became appallingly clear that the catastrophe had been caused, in large measure, by com munications failure despite copious and reliable information. And the war itself - especially the total failure of its one and only strategic concept, Winston Churchill's Gallipoli campaign in 1915-16 - was patently a tragicomedy of noncommunica tions. At the same time, the period immediately following World War I - a period of industrial strife and of total non communication between Westerners and 'revolutionary' Com- Paper read before the Fellows of the International Academy of Manage ment, Tokyo, Japan, October 1969. Published in Management Today, March 1970, as 'What Communication Means',