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Thought for Friday: ".......and society is totally unprepared for it"

A thought for a a Friday

In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce.

It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time - literally - substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves.

And society is totally unprepared for it.

         

           Peter Drucker

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To what extent are these changes a result of technology? Should we be thanking the engineers and scientists more than the politicians for social progress?

I think it's largely an illusion (propagated by politicians) that they have the significant effect they claim. The effects on us all of global events are more profound than in the past because we're more connected than ever. Trans-national stuff does that, national politicians don't. That's why people don't vote IMHO.

I'm cheered by the fact that, as more people can communicate much more easily with each other thanks t'interweb, more good stuff can emerge.

Bits of the wisdom of Peter Drucker seem to be making a comeback. Although some of the dafter things he wrote are politely forgotten. Others, about outsourcing; and back-office/front office for example, are now "conventional wisdom" - however harmful they have turned out to be.

Drucker's first book on management came out when he was thirty. The last one was published posthumously. So there's an awful lot of it; a vast back catalogue It's as Leonard Cohen sings:

"You'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone.

I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song."

I'm sure that what Mr Drucker says would apply to a person of modest means facing a big lottery win.

But is this wisdom? Not sure how profound this is. All he seems to be saying is that the wealthy have more choices than the poor and (when he was writing) some people were getting richer. This has been true for a while.

Like much expensive management-speak, this is banal comment gussied up with fancy phrases to make it sound more impressive than it really is.

The emptiness is now exposed as, due to mountainous and crippling national debt, "substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people" nowadays have fewer choices, not more.

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