9 Prophecies from Peter Drucker

[cross posted at outsourcingstrategy.org]
The latest newsletter from Geoffrey Moore’s TCG Advisors has a cool tribute to Drucker:
Peter Drucker, the most influential thinker on the practice of organizational management, had many admirable qualities that kept his mind young and active right up until the day he died in early November at the ripe old age of 95. One of them was his uncanny ability to interpret trends and foresee critical socioeconomic changes.
Examples cited in a recent Wall Street Journal article by magazine publisher Steve Forbes include the following nine amazing insights:
In the fifties and sixties:
– The rise of knowledge workers, resulting from the bulge in education that occurred as a direct effect of the post-war GI Bill;
– The breakdown of the traditional, integrated, hierarchical industrial corporation;
– The rise of Japan as a major economy, when many experts thought that it would remain a nation of small farmers and cheap and shoddy goods;
In the eighties and nineties:
– The decline of the Japanese economy as a result of an aging population and a lack of vigorous entrepreneurship and worker flexibility;
– The adverse impact on corporate governance of the rise of corporate and government pension funds;
– The backlash against the rise of CEO pay that eventually occurred after the bursting of the late nineties bubble;
More recent predictions:
– The threat to conventional higher education institutions to come from the rise of satellites and the internet;
– The positive effects of outsourcing on the U.S. economy, resulting from the fact that “we import two to three times as many jobs as we export”;
– The huge and enduring advantage that the U.S. has over Europe and Japan due to American workers’ flexibility, not only for changing jobs but for physically moving from one geographic area to another in order to pursue a new opportunity.
Hmmm.
There’s some more good stuff in the newsletter, including an article on deliberate innovation. (That’s a separate post!)