Greetings from Amazon.com Delivers Business and Investing
For most of this century, Peter Drucker has accurately defined the development of corporate life, not just in the United States but around the world. So it's not too surprising that in "Management Challenges for the 21st Century," Drucker lights a path for business well into the next century. In this interview with Amazon.com, Drucker shares his views on everything from fish farming to today's stock market. You can find "Management Challenges for the 21st Century" at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0887309984/entertainmentsit ****** Amazon.com: Most would pigeonhole you as a business writer and thinker, but your work goes far beyond business and into areas such as politics, nonprofits, social issues, and more. How do you characterize yourself and your work? Drucker: You are quite right: "business writer" is the wrong pigeonhole for me. First, it's been a main point in my work for 50 years that management is not business management but the governing organ of all organizations. Second, very little of my writing has to do with business proper--not, for instance, my latest book. Only one of my books actually deals with business: "Managing for Results." All the others deal with management. And, as you rightly point out, more than half of my books do not even deal with management but with politics, society, and history--plus two novels and a book that is quasi history, quasi autobiography. And my consulting practice has for many years now been split between business enterprises and pro-bono consulting for nonprofits, churches, museums, symphony orchestras, opera houses, hospitals, universities, the Red Cross, the Girl Scouts, and so on. Similarly, in the Advanced Executive Management program at Claremont, which I helped found and in which I still teach, we insisted, right from the start, on a mix of business executives--never more than 60 percent--and nonbusiness executives from government, the military, and all kinds of nonprofits. But even my appeal to business executives, both as readers and as clients, rests largely on my always treating business not as an economic but as a social and human institution. As to what I call myself, I like to say "writer"; but that doesn't satisfy people. So I have come to call myself a social ecologist concerned with the artificial environment, just as the nature ecologist is concerned with the natural environment. Amazon.com: What's your perspective on the Internet? Many liken it to the spread of electricity at the turn of the century. Is it as profound as that? Or less so? Drucker: The impact of the Internet will be more like that of the railroad 170 years ago--much more profound than electricity. And just as the railroad, which was the peak of the first industrial revolution, was followed immediately by the emergence of industries that owed nothing technologically to steam and the steam engine--for example, the electric telegraph, followed immediately by fertilizer, photography and optics, commercial and investment banking--so the next wave, already visible just off shore, will be industries that owe little to information and the computer. Biotechnology, for instance, may be the biggest and most revolutionary wave ahead of us. Also fish farming is rapidly turning us from being hunters and gatherers on the sea into aquaculturists, in the same way that our remote ancestors 10,000 years ago were turned from hunters and gathers into agriculturists. Amazon.com: More people than ever are investing their retirement and savings into a market that some think is a bubble about burst, while others see a boom that will go on forever. This level of participation in the market is much different from 20 or 30 years ago. Does anything bother you about the current run-up in the stock market? Drucker: I am scared silly--having started working in 1927 as an apprentice in a textile-export firm. I grew up in the years of the stock market crash of 1929 and of the depression. Back then, 3 percent of America's families--so the statistics say--were in the stock market and hit directly by the crash. Now the statistics say it's 47 percent. Personally, I still believe in the old rule my old and wise boss in London (when I was an investment banker from 1934 to 1937) hammered into my numb skull. I was supposed to be the firm's economist and asset manager. He told me that people over 50 or 55 must not have more than one third of their assets in equities--they won't live long enough to see the eventual recovery if there is a crash or depression. And of those 47 percent now in the stock market, a very large proportion are older people, if only because the young ones don't have the savings yet. The full text of Amazon.com's interview with Peter Drucker is at Business & Investing Featured in this e-mail: "Management Challenges for the 21st Century" by Peter Drucker http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0887309984/entertainmentsit ****** You'll find more great books, articles, excerpts, and interviews in Amazon.com's Business & Investing section at Business & Investing
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