For those who don’t know, Peter Drucker is responsible for much of the development of the concept of management as a discipline. He is a deep thinker about society and social change. He is now 92 years old and I was privileged to hear a talk he gave at an investment conference last week. I thought I would share a few of the ideas he spoke about.
A major theme of this conference was about changing demographics (William Sharpe, a nobel laureate economist also talked at length about changing demographics). Peter talked about how there has been a dramatic change in workers in the last 50 years. That the ‘blue collar’ worker of the early 21st century is actually a knowledge worker. He feels that one of the major problems for inner city dwellers is their inability to make the transition from traditional blue collar jobs into information related professions.
Peter spoke at length about information. He said that we are not really in an ‘information age’ any more than people were in an ‘electricity age’ 50 years ago. Not that information is not important, but that it is not the driving force behind changes in society. He feels that social changes, such as changing demographics will have a much greater impact than information. He also talked about how computers are not providing information, but rather data. The analogy that he used was a telephone book. The book is full of phone numbers, or data. But the one phone number you need, that’s information. He feels that computers are not really giving us much information, but rather lots and lots of data. And that can make getting actual information harder, not easier.
He talked about the growth of financial services. He said that the big change in the last 50 years has been the growth of financial services, not the growth of technology. That 50 years ago, financial services were 1/5th the size of the manufacturing part of the US economy. Now it’s 2 1/2 times the size of manufacturing.
Some interesting observations from a guy who has been writing about management and economics since the Great Depression