MNG TURBULENT TIMES

by Peter F. Drucker

This book, the author explains, "is concerned with action rather than understanding, with decisions rather than analysis." It deals with the strategies needed to transform rapid changes into opportunities, to turn the threat of change into productive and profitable action that contributes positively to our society, the economy, and the individual.

Genres: Business, Management, Leadership

Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was a writer, management consultant and university professor. His writing focused on management-related literature. Peter Drucker made famous the term knowledge worker and is thought to have unknowingly ushered in the knowledge economy, which effectively challenges Karl Marx's world-view of the political economy. George Orwell credits Peter Drucker as one of the only writers to predict the German-Soviet Pact of 1939.

The son of a high level civil servant in the Habsburg empire, Drucker was born in the chocolate capital of Austria, in a small village named Kaasgraben (now a suburb of Vienna, part of the 19th district, Döbling). Following the defeat of Austria-Hungary in World War I, there were few opportunities for employment in Vienna so after finishing school he went to Germany, first working in banking and then in journalism. While in Germany, he earned a doctorate in International Law. The rise of Nazism forced him to leave Germany in 1933. After spending four years in London, in 1937 he moved permanently to the United States, where he became a university professor as well as a freelance writer and business guru. In 1943 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught at New York University as a Professor of Management from 1950 to 1971. From 1971 to his death he was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately this is a book that did not age well - not an essential read for the modern manager. Many of its thoughts and beliefs have been proven false since its publishing. I like reading business books from years ago to see what truly is proven theory over time and what "facts" changed. Regardless, the below notes from the book seem to be of quality.

- But planning, as commonly practiced, assumes a high degree of continuity.
- Four key resources have to be managed consistently, systematically, and conscientiously for productivity. They are capital, crucial physical assets, time, and knowledge.
- The first step toward managing the productivity of capital is to know where all the money in the business really is.
- But the first and most important step always is to find out where the money is.
- It is reasonable to suggest that many of the giants of tomorrow will be companies that either do not exist today or are so small as to be almost invisible.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Drucker's career as a business thinker took off in 1942, when his initial writings on politics and society won him access to the internal workings of General Motors (GM), one of the largest companies in the world at that time. The resulting book, Concept of the Corporation, popularized GM's multidivisional structure and led to numerous articles, consulting engagements, and additional books. While GM, however, was hardly thrilled, I became enamored of Drucker’s scholarship as a GM employee in the late 90s. This is one of the books that has lingered unread in my collection since leaving GM. I decided to dive in and see if I was still impressed by his cognition. In the first, I would say quarter or so, I thought the work was filled with meaningless platitudes that I could see little value in and felt this was headed to a 2-star review and my final Drucker reading.

The after fifty pages or so, my interest was piqued my his foresight of the internet and information age:

A major impact is going to be in communications. Until now, electronic communication has largely adapted itself to the traditional definition of voice, vision, and graphics as distinct separate kinds of communication. From now on, electronics will increasingly produce total communications. By the middle of 1980 the Business Communications Satellite (a joint venture of IBM, Xerox, and the American satellite company Comsat) should be in operation in the United States. It will make possible simultaneous and instantaneous electronic transmission of voice, of vision, and of graphics (such as documents or charts). This will enable people in twenty-five places anywhere on the face of the globe to be in one visual place where they can talk to each other directly, see each other, and if need be share the same reports, the same documents, the same graphs simultaneously, without leaving their own office or home. The equivalent communications capacity is available in a number of different systems—for instance, in the new telephone exchanges that are being pioneered by the British Post Office and by competitors to the Bell Telephone System in the United States.

As a result, business travel on the airlines has probably passed its peak. Such travel was one of the growth industries of the post-World War II period. It should increasingly become less important, although its place may well be taken (and taken with a vengeance) by travel for vacation, learning, and sheer curiosity, defined as non-business travel. But business travel should become less and less necessary. It will be possible for executives to get together without moving that heavy, inert object, the human body, and inflicting upon it stupefying hours of vibration in stale air. Increasingly, we will be able to meet "in person" without having to move the person.

An equal or more important change will be the ability to substitute electronic transmission of graphics for the shipping of heavy paper. Marshall McLuhan made the headlines in the sixties by predicting that the electronic "message" would replace the old traditional "medium," the printed word, the graphic information. This has not happened and it will not happen. On the contrary, electronics are becoming the main channel for the transmission of graphic, printed information. Until today, we had to put a few grains of ink on half a pound of heavy cellulose through a printing process, and then to transport the inert mass of cellulose over long distances, to be finally hand-carried to the individual audience, slowly and at great cost. But today almost everyone has two printing plants in his home, the telephone and the television set…

Of course, he foresaw the turbulence due to come:

The examples given above are not a listing but a sample. What is clear is that the tremendous amount of new knowledge produced in the last thirty years since the end of World War II is now beginning to have an impact on technology. Knowledge is becoming performance, and this means rapid change. The technological change is only a part of the story; social change and social innovation should be equally important. It is highly possible that we can anticipate a period of rapid change in a great number of areas, regardless of the attitude of the public toward technological change. Resistance to change may make it more expensive but is unlikely to slow it down. Resistance to change may mean that economic leadership tomorrow passes from old to new countries, and from old to new industries. In the late nineteenth century Great Britain lost her leadership, which passed to Germany and the United States. And in the period after World War II the Japanese, precisely because they were in many ways technologically backward, could gain leadership in an area that traditional Western industry had largely neglected— high-technology consumer goods. Such shifts may happen again, are indeed likely to happen again. But this does not alter the fact that technology is changing rapidly and that innovation, both technological and social, is speeding up and is likely to change the structure of economy and society.

And the blogosphere would not have surprised Drucker:

In publishing, one trend is clearly toward very large systems: a national or worldwide system for the electronic communication of graphics would be very big indeed. At the same time, the conversion of every telephone or television set into a printing plant offers unlimited opportunity for a truly small publication, such as the specialized magazine for the beekeeper that cannot count on more than 10,000 subscribers in the United States, and maybe not more than 25,000 worldwide. If transmitted over the television set, such a magazine might well become economically viable.

This may be pointing out the obvious or maybe “too soon”, but Drucker does it so well. But is he an overly optimistic Cassandra:

There is only one country left where a migration will still continue: the United States. America can expect large-scale migration from Mexico, a very poor country with one of the largest labor surpluses and one of the highest unemployment rates, yet located next to the richest country and one of its richest areas, the Southwest, with a very low supply of indigenous young people for traditional jobs.

There is no way to prevent mass migration from Mexico over an open 2,000-mile border into the United States, both into the Southwest from San Diego to Denver and into the metropolitan areas of the East and Midwest—New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago—with their already large Hispanic populations. Indeed, the Reconquista of southern California by Mexican immigrants has already begun. By the year 2000, Hispanic-Americans should account for some 50 million of an American population of 250 million; they are about 15 million now. Whether they are officially "legal," "illegal," or "quasi-legal" is immaterial. In any event, the Southwest of the United States may be the only region in the developed world to show a sizable growth in traditional manufacturing industry over the next twenty or twenty-five years.

Socially and culturally, a mass migration of Mexicans to the United States will exacerbate racial and ethnic tensions. With a near-majority in America becoming Roman Catholics in a country of the "Protestant ethos," religion might become a political issue again. There might even be a "black backlash" as the "Chicanos" from Mexico threaten to displace the American black as the officially "disadvantaged" and thus officially privileged "minority." But these are exactly the problems the United States is used to and has handled—or mishandled—throughout all her history. Economically, the mass migration from Mexico, whatever the labor unions might say, should be beneficial and should in fact endow American manufacturing with competitive strength such as it has not known for quite some time.

The modern concept of globalism arose in the post-war debates of the 1940s in the United States. Drucker often refers to that era as the germination of much contemporary economics and sociological trends. I think he expresses a perceptive and advanced understanding of globalist worldview and deservedly employs different adjectives to talk about “integrated trade” and “transnational.”

We are about to enter the stage of integrated trade, for this is what production sharing means. Yet economists, theoreticians, and policymakers are totally unprepared for the challenge. In fact, the lack of concepts and of measurements is a serious problem. Our concepts cannot as yet handle production sharing.

A government statistician will record the export of hides from America as "exports" and the import of shoes as "imports"; his figures will nowhere relate the two. The American cattle grower does not even know that his livelihood depends on the sale of foreign-made shoes in the American market, for hides represent the margin between breaking even and making a profit for the livestock grower in Nebraska. Nor, conversely, does the Haitian manufacturer of the soles for these American shoes realize that he depends on hides grown in the United States. No one yet perceives the relationships. And when shoe workers' unions in the United States or shoe manufacturers in North Carolina agitate for a ban on the importation of "cheap foreign imports," no cattle grower in the Great Plains realizes that they are actually agitating to ban the export of American hides on which his livelihood depends. When the American tanning industry—as it does— asks for a ban on sending hides abroad, American shoe retailers (let alone American consumers) do not realize that this would mean having no shoes to sell in American shops. They do not know that there are not enough American workers available to do even a fraction of the tanning needed.

I wonder if that shoe manufacturing analysis still holds? This resonated with me since the US government announced last week a 25% tariff on all single malt scotch whisky imports as part of a wider set of tariffs aiming to punish the European Union. Well, I know making Scotch requires the oak barrels from manufacturers of American bourbon. Especially in this day of so many small business craft spirits, what of artisan distillers whose margins require selling of their barrels to scotch makers selling to the American market?

This book contains history lessons the development of the nation concept and how the current changes may be redefining that in a thought-provoking section “The End of Sovereignty”.

The modern national state was built on the theorem that political territory and economic territory must be congruent, with the unity of the two forged by governmental control of money—a startling heresy when it was first propounded in the sixteenth century. The code word for this new politico economic unit was the term "sovereignty/' Prior to the late sixteenth century, economic and political systems were quite separate. Money was basically beyond political control except insofar as the Prince made a substantial profit by reserving to himself the right to mint coins. Commerce before the seventeenth century was either transnational or purely local. In the Europe of 1500, before the long inflation of the sixteenth century destroyed the economic system of the time, long distance trade was carried out by trading cities, the sixteenth century equivalent of the multinational corporation of today, and equally controversial, equally criticized, equally reviled. The domestic economy was organized around a market town, which was the center of a self-sufficient agrarian economy in which money, while used to calculate, was only in very limited circulation. And long-distance trade and local market town economy were almost completely insulated from each other, the former with free-market prices, the latter with rigid price controls.

The modern national state was born with the assertion that money and credit have to be controlled by the sovereign and that the economy has to be integrated into the political system, if only to provide the Prince with the means to recruit and pay his mercenaries. The modern national state created national markets within which both long-distance commerce and local trade were unified. "Sovereignty" reached its logical climax in Keynes's theories of the late twenties and early thirties which, in effect, proclaimed that a country—or at least a major country such as the Great Britain of his day—could manage its economy irrespective of the world economy, and largely independent of economic fluctuations and business cycles, by managing and manipulating money and credit.

This leads to descriptions new to me of the Eurodollar and wonder how Drucker would opine on cryptocurrency...

[See my full review at Outsight Book Reader Diary]

[Szymon Uczciwek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Może to nie jest odkrywcze, natomiast nikt wprost nie pisze tego, tak jak Drucker: rolą managera jest poprawiać produktywność pracownikow. W czasach szybkich zmian, musi on się zmieniać i zmieniać to co ta produktywność poprawia. Dużo autor poświęca czasu na demografie i podział produkcji miedzy kraje rozwinięte i rozwijające. Kraje rozwijające przenoszą produkcje do krajów rozwijających się nie dlatego ze jest tanio a dlatego, ze nie maja już ludzi do tego typu prac. Kraje rozwijające się nie są wyzyskiwane przez dostarczanie taniej siły roboczej a dostaj�� szanse aby dostępna sila robocza miała miejsca pracy przez zapewnienie rynku zbytu na ich produkcje. Takie proste a tak mało powszechne tłumaczenie. Książka z lat 80 a nadal może zaskoczyć.

[Vishal Kale · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is titled Managing in Turbulent Times; a venture in which is fails magnificently. But, as the movie dialogue of LOC Kargil stated – some goals are so worthy it is glorious even to fail. The book has failed – totally failed – in answering the problem it starts out asking; nonetheless, this deeply engaging, rewarding and informative book does give truckloads of value addition to the practicing Business Manager, even now – 30+ years after it was first penned!

It is subdivided into chapters Managing for Fundamentals, Managing For Tomorrow, Managing The Sea Change, Managing Turbulent Environments. The entire approach of the book is that of a birds’ eye view rather than a microscopic view of the Business Environment. By that, I mean the book looks extensively at the macro environmental factors, typically ones that are national or global or at least industry-wide. It does not dig deep into the why, how of managing a business during turbulent times; rather, imho, it helps us understand what a turbulent time is, and what we can expect. Given that this book is dated, this also tells us it is feasible to spot macro trends long before they actually start, which is a decided plus in the modern fast-changing environment.

Read More : https://reflectionsvvk.blogspot.in/20...

[Krishna Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drucker wrote this book in the 1980’s, at a time of political and social upheaval in the United States and abroad. He foresaw many of the changes happening in the workforce as well as the family, and how that would affect the typical corporation. He also discusses the demographic changes in the future that would alter the labor market. As far as the predictions go, Drucker is mostly right about the US markets, but falters when he talks about the dismemberment of nations like Spain and Canada. And who knew that most Communist regimes would go out of business before the end of the decade.

Though several years have passed since the publication of this book, the fundamental outlook of this book remains relevant. Managers must look outside of their organization and society to understand events and trends that would affect their organizations. They should prepare or take action to exploit these turbulences instead of being knocked around by them. Like Drucker, we cannot be entirely sure of the exact shape of the final state of affairs that events would lead to, but we can monitor them and be at the forefront of using them to our advantage.

[202 unknown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vẫn có thể có những bài học hữu ích nhưng thời điểm sách ra mắt cách xa hiện tại (1970) và ngôn ngữ dịch k thoát hết ý khiến giá trị bản dịch tiếng Việt đem lại trở nên hạn chế

đọc lại thì bối cảnh xa xôi và nhiều phần đề cập về chính trị đủ để một con buôn chính trị như mình cảm thấy oải là hiểu haha, thôi ráng quay về với Kotter và Welch vậy

[daniel dirnfeld · Rating 5 out of 5]

Drucker is very capable of explaining every subject