The Frontiers of Management

Where Tomorrow's Decisions Are Being Shaped Today

Peter F. Drucker

Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1986 , 368 pages

ISBN: 0-7506-2182-6

Synopsis:

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The Frontiers of Management offers stimulating and profitable reading for both existing Drucker disciples and those new to his writing. This collection of thirty-five balanced articles and essays, plus an interview and afterword, was planned by the author from the beginning to be published eventually in one volume and as variations on one unifying theme — the challenges of tomorrow that face executives today.

What kind of tomorrow it will be depends heavily on the knowledge, insight, foresight and competence of the decision makers of today. The future is in the hands of executives who are already fully occupied with the daily crisis, and for whom the daily crisis is the one absolutely predictable event in their working day. It is to these people that this new Drucker volume is addressed, to enable them to see and to understand the long-range implications and impacts of their immediate, everyday, urgent actions and decisions.

The Frontiers of Management not only aims at providing and promoting knowledge, insight, foresight and competence — it aims at creating vision.

Table of Contents:

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• Preface: The Future Is Being Shaped Today
• Interview: A Talk with a Wide-Ranging Mind
• Part I. Economics
1. The Changed World Economy
2. America's Entrepreneurial Job Machine
3. Why OPEC Had to Fail
4. The Changing Multinational
5. Managing Currency Exposure
6. Export Markets and Domestic Policies
7. Europe's High-Tech Ambitions
8. What We Can Learn from the Germans
9. On Entering the Japanese Market
10. Trade with Japan: The Way It Works
11. The Perils of Adversarial Trade
12. Modern Prophets: Schumpeter or Keynes?
• Part II. People
13. Picking People: The Basic Rules
14. Measuring White-Collar Productivity
15. Twilight of the First-Line Supervisor?
16. Overpaid Executives: The Greed Effect
17. Overage Executives: Keeping Firms Young
18. Paying the Professional Schools
19. Jobs and People: The Growing Mismatch
20. Quality Education: The New Growth Area
• Part III. Management
21. Management: The Problem of Success
22. Getting Control of Staff Work
23. Slimming Management's Midriff
24. The Information-Based Organization
25. Are Labor Unions Becoming Irrelevant?
26. Union Flexibility: Why It's Now a Must
27. Management as a Liberal Art
    
• Part IV. The Organization
28. The Hostile Takeover and Its Discontents
29. The Five Rules of Successful Acquisitions
30. The Innovative Organization
31. The No-Growth Enterprise
32. Why Automation Pays Off
33. IBM's Watson: Vision for Tomorrow
34. The Lessons of the Bell Breakup
35. Social Needs and Business Opportunities
    
• Afterword: Social Innovation — Management's New Dimension