The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different

Peter Drucker

The two most interesting arguments in “The Concept of the Corporation” … dominate his work.

The first had to do with “empowering” workers. Mr. Drucker believed in treating workers as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production that then dominated the manufacturing sector—partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest and partly because they failed to engage the creativity of individual workers. He was equally scathing of managers who simply regarded companies as a way of generating short-term profits. In the late 1990s he turned into one of America's leading critics of soaring executive pay, warning that “in the next economic downturn, there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the super-corporate chieftains who pay themselves millions.”

The second argument had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Mr. Drucker argued that the world is moving from an “economy of goods” to an economy of “knowledge”—and from a society dominated by an industrial proletariat to one dominated by brain workers. He insisted that this had profound implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like cogs in a huge inhuman machine—the idea at the heart of Frederick Taylor's stopwatch management—and start treating them as brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realize that knowledge, and hence education, was the single most important resource for any advanced society.

www.economist.com

Drucker thought of himself as a loner, as someone well outside the mainstream of management education. “I have always been a loner,” he said once. “I work best outside. That’s where I’m most effective. I would be a very poor manager. Hopeless. And a company job would bore me to death. I enjoy being an outsider.”

www.economist.com