The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society and Economy - Hardcover

DRUCKER

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0071700455 ISBN 13: 9780071700450

Verlag: McGraw Hill, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Previously unpublished talks from the Father of Modern Management

Throughout his professional life, Peter F. Drucker inspired millions of business leaders not only through his famous writings but also through his lectures and keynotes. These speeches contained some of his most valuable insights, but had never been published in book form-until now.

The Drucker Lectures features more than 30 talks from one of management's most important figures. Drawn from the Drucker Archives at the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, the lectures showcase Drucker's wisdom, wit, profundity, and prescience on such topics as:

• Politics and economics of the environment
• Knowledge workers and the Knowledge Society
• Computer and information literacy
• Managing nonprofit organizations
• Globalization

During his life, Drucker well understood that over the last 150 years the world had become a society of large institutions-and that they would only become larger and more powerful. He contended that unless these institutions were effectively managed and ethically led, the good health of society as a whole would be in peril. His prediction is unfolding before our eyes.

The Drucker Lectures is a timely, instructive book proving that responsible behavior and good business can, in fact, exist hand in hand.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter F. Drucker was a writer, teacher, and consultant whose twenty-nine previous books have been published in more than twenty languages. He was the founder of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.

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The DRUCKER Lectures

ESSENTIAL LESSONS ON MANAGEMENT, SOCIETY, AND ECONOMY

By Peter F. Drucker, Rick Wartzman

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 The Drucker Institute
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-07-170045-0

Contents

Introduction
Part I 1940s
1. How Is Human Existence Possible? (1943)
2. The Myth of the State (1947)
Part II 1950s
3. The Problems of Maintaining Continuous and Full Employment (1957)
Part III 1960s
4. The First Technological Revolution and Its Lessons (1965)
5. Management in the Big Organizations (1967)
Part IV 1970s
6. Politics and Economics of the Environment (1971)
7. What We Already Know about American Education Tomorrow (1971)
8. Claremont Address (1974)
9. Structural Changes in the World Economy and Society as They Affect 
American Business (1977)
Part V 1980s
10. Managing the Increasing Complexity of Large Organizations (1981)
11. The Information-Based Organization (1987)
12. Knowledge Lecture I (1989)
13. Knowledge Lecture II ((1989)
14. Knowledge Lecture III (1989)
15. Knowledge Lecture IV (1989)
16. Knowledge Lecture V (1989)
Part VI 1990s
17. The New Priorities (1991)
18. Do You Know Where You Belong? (1992)
19. The Era of the Social Sector (1994)
20. The Knowledge Worker and the Knowledge Society (1994)
21. Reinventing Government: The Next Phase (1994)
22. Manage Yourself and Then Your Company (1996)
23. On Health Care (1996)
24. The Changing World Economy (1997)
25. Deregulation and the Japanese Economy (1998)
26. Managing Oneself (1999)
27. From Teaching to Learning (1999)
Part VII 2000s
28. On Globalization (2001)
29. Managing the Nonprofit Organization (2001)
30. The Future of the Corporation I (2003)
31. The Future of the Corporation II (2003)
32. The Future of the Corporation III (2003)
33. The Future of the Corporation IV (2003)
About Peter F. Drucker
Books by Peter F. Drucker
Index

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

How Is Human Existence Possible?1943

There has never been a century of Western history so far removed from anawareness of the tragic as that which bequeathed to us two world wars. It hastrained all of us to suppress the tragic, to shut our eyes to it, to deny itsexistence.

Not quite 200 years ago—in 1755 to be exact—the death of 15,000 menin the Lisbon earthquake was enough to bring down the structure of traditionalChristian belief in Europe. The contemporaries could not make sense of it. Theycould not reconcile this horror with the concept of an all-merciful God. Andthey could not see any answer to a catastrophe of such magnitude. Now, we dailylearn of slaughter and destruction of vastly greater numbers, of whole peoplesbeing starved or exterminated, of whole cities being leveled overnight. And itis far more difficult to explain these man-made catastrophes in terms of ournineteenth-century rationality than it was for the eighteenth century to explainthe earthquake of Lisbon in the terms of the rationality of eighteenth-centuryChristianity. Yet I do not think that those contemporary catastrophes haveshaken the optimism of these thousands of committees that are dedicated to thebelief that permanent peace and prosperity will inevitably issue from this war.Sure, they are aware of the facts and are duly outraged by them. But they refuseto see them as catastrophes.

Yet however successful the nineteenth century was in suppressing the tragic inorder to make possible human existence exclusively in time, there is one factwhich could not be suppressed, one fact that remains outside of time: death. Itis the one fact that cannot be made general but remains unique, the one factthat cannot be socialized but remains individual. The nineteenth century madeevery effort to strip death of its individual, unique, and qualitative aspect.It made death an incident in vital statistics, measurable quantitatively,predictable according to the natural laws of probability. It tried to get arounddeath by organizing away its consequences. This is the meaning of lifeinsurance, which promises to take the consequences out of death. Life insuranceis perhaps the most representative institution of nineteenth-centurymetaphysics; for its promise "to spread the risks" shows most clearly the natureof this attempt to make death an incident in human life, instead of itstermination.

It was the nineteenth century that invented Spiritualism with its attempt tocontrol life after death by mechanical means. Yet death persists. Society mightmake death taboo, might lay down the rule that it is bad manners to speak ofdeath, might substitute "hygienic" cremation for those horribly public funerals,and might call gravediggers "morticians." The learned Professor [Ernst] Haeckel[the German naturalist] might hint broadly that Darwinian biology is just aboutto make us live permanently; but he did not make good his promise. And as longas death persists, man remains with one pole of his existence outside of societyand outside of time.

As long as death persists, the optimistic concept of life, the belief thateternity can be reached through time, and that the individual can fulfillhimself in society can therefore have only one outcome: despair. There must comea point in the life of every man when he suddenly finds himself facing death.And at this point he is all alone; he is all individual. If he is lost, hisexistence becomes meaningless. [Danish philosopher and theologian Soren]Kierkegaard, who first diagnosed the phenomenon and predicted where it wouldlead to, called it the "despair at not willing to be an individual."Superficially the individual can recover from this encounter with the problem ofexistence in eternity. He may even forget it for a while. But he can neverregain his confidence in his existence in society: Basically he remains indespair.

Society must thus attempt to make it possible for man to die if it wants him tobe able to live exclusively in society. There is only one way in which societycan do that: by making individual life itself meaningless. If you are nothingbut a leaf on the tree, a cell in the body of society, then your death is notreally a death; it is only a part of the life of the whole. You can hardly eventalk of death; you better call it a process of collective regeneration. Butthen, of course, your life is not real life, either; it is just a functionalprocess within the life of the whole, devoid of any meaning except in terms ofthe whole.

Thus you can see what Kierkegaard saw clearly a hundred years ago: that theoptimism...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: McGraw Hill
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0071700455
• ISBN 13: 9780071700450
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 285
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar