Peter F. Drucker on Technology by Peter F. Drucker

Author:Peter F. Drucker [Peter F. Drucker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2020-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

The Job Which Most Managers Were Brought Up to Spend Most Time On Will Disappear

The literature of management has been concerned, over the last fifty years, with the management part of the job, because it was the new thing. This is not going to become less important, but it is going to become relatively less urgent. The job which most managers have been brought up to spend most of their time on is scratching for a little dubious information about what happened yesterday. Accept the fact that, the day after tomorrow, they will be able to get it. Our great-great-grandfathers, who started industries, spent most of their time trying to get a little power. We now turn a switch. Nobody worries a great deal about where to get power from. Tomorrow we will no longer have to worry about where we get the other form of energy: the input of the mind, the information input. That will be easy, too.

Now, however, we have to learn a great deal about the entrepreneurial part of the job, to which we have really paid very little attention during these last fifty or sixty years. It is going to be different and quite demanding for two reasons. First, I think it is likely that the last third of the century will be as innovative an era as was the corresponding period of the nineteenth century. We are already getting industries that are based on the knowledge of this century and are quite different; and there is going to be need for a lot of innovation, not just technological, but social and economic as well. At the same time, the pattern of the late nineteenth century, in which you had the individual inventor, who then somehow teamed up with the money man, is likely to be repeated.

A great deal of the innovating activity will have to be carried on in existing businesses, where it has not been done so far. By and large, the old folklore which says that existing businesses are incapable of doing the really new things has so far been proved. Even though they all spend a lot of money on research and development, there is not very much to show for it, except some very beautiful buildings in parklike surroundings.

We have to learn to do the job, simply because the economic realities force us to do so. Not only is every single taxation system, in every single developed country, forcing the capital to stay in existing businesses; but also the human resources are there, and it is of the essence of the new industries that the development stage is where you really need men and money. It is not true that inventions become marketable products faster these days. They become marketable products much less fast. In the nineteenth century, within a few months of invention of the electric light bulb and the telephone, on the other side of the Atlantic, you had commercial installation of both in London. This speed we do not have today.

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