Managing in the Next Society by Peter Drucker

Author:Peter Drucker [Drucker, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Management, General, Business & Economics, Strategic Planning
ISBN: 9781136384073
Google: wAFdkE3GFpoC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-07-26T21:00:27+00:00

THE ASIAN CRISIS

The economic troubles in Asia don’t really interest me all that much because what you can fix with money is unlikely to be much of a problem unless you are stupid.

And Asians are not stupid. Fundamentally, the Asian crisis is not economic, but social. Across the entire region, the social tensions are so high that it reminds me of the Europe of my youth that descended into two world wars.

In many ways, we see in Asia the same kind of tensions that arose in Europe as a result of the “great disturbance” of the mass Industrial Revolution and the rapid urbanization that accompanied it. Only Asia’s disturbance has taken place at a vastly accelerated pace.

When I first came to know Korea in the 1950s, it was 80 percent rural and practically nobody had more than a high school education because the occupying Japanese hadn’t allowed it.

(Only the Christian missionary schools could function because they couldn’t be suppressed by the Japanese, which explains why 30 percent of Koreans are Christians.)

There was no industry because the Japanese didn’t allow anyone to have more than a few employees.

Today, Korea is almost 90 percent urban, an industrial powerhouse, and its population is highly educated. All in forty years.

The dislocations of this topsy-turvy development in only four decades have been explosive.

Add to this the unrivaled stupidity of the Korean businessmen who learned nothing from the Japanese next door about how to treat their workers. Japan learned the hard way—through two bloody strikes that almost overturned the government in 1948 and 1954—to treat human beings like human beings. (Nobody seems to know that Japan had had the world’s worst history of labor troubles dating back to 1700.)

When foreigners would visit an electronics plant in Korea, if one of the assembly-line women so much as even looked up, she was taken out and beaten for not paying attention to her work.

The autocrats of Korean business not only treated the workers horribly, but kept control of all the money and power in their companies. They treated middle management like black Mississippi schoolteachers in the old days of segregation.

The autocrats then worked hand in hand with the military to keep their power and keep the workers down.

This is finally all changing now with Kim Dae Jung, but it has left a legacy of deep hatred between Korean business and its workers.

In Malaysia, despite efforts over the years by the government, the tension between the Malays, who are 70 percent of the population, and the Chinese, who are 30 percent, remains high.

Prime Minister Mohamad Mahathir once asked me to advise him on how to keep the Malays in school. So, I visited some villages and found that everything grows there—plantains, bananas, coconuts, apples. And they have pigs and chickens. Nobody has to lift a finger to eat. If they can make enough money for a TV set and a motorbike by working a few hours a year, what more would they want? Why stay in school beyond the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.