Jay | Discovery

[书评] 阿兰·德波顿：工作的苦与乐

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:02:16 +0800

苦干，再苦干
工作的苦与乐
日常工作的奇妙

阿兰·德波顿，英国散文家、小说家，有人甚至说他是哲学家。过去十多年来他把厌世的目光投向过旅行、社会身份和建筑诸多领域，写过有关哲学家们的好书和关于普鲁斯特的沉思录。他的新作《工作的苦与乐》(国内版本后来译作《工作颂歌》上海译文出版社2010年01月版——译者注)，向我们展示了占据人们大部分清醒时间的那些事儿。

给德波顿先生挑点茬很容易，他把新书描述成“对现代工作场所的智慧、奇特、美丽和厌恶的颂诗”，他其实是故意发飙。当然，如果要像他那么研究，随便找出几段荒诞的工作经历很容易。他选择的目标很简单，比如一种英国的巧克力脆饼Moments的设计、市场营销和制造，再比如一个把都热情投入到为高压电线架的结构特性编目录的人。

即使那些脑力最出色的人，比如建造强大的火箭和极精巧的卫星的物理学家，他们的工作也可以被嘲弄一番。他们智力上的成就把卫星设计并发射到地球同步轨道，应该最后用到更人文主义或者文化的那一端，而不是用到目标对象是日本小学生的“沃沃”电视频道上。那为什么不多写点呢？为什么不写一章自己终其一生编哲学和大众心理学书的荒诞不经呢？抑或，就此而言，写点半夜挑灯夜战、独自对着电脑啃这些书的虚度光阴呢？你很可能会很无厘头地冒出这些想法。

只可惜事实并不是这样。许多工作富有创造性、吸引人、有价值、还富有成就感。对很多人来说，工作一直是可以找理由不用带小孩或是付帐单的美差，很值得做。

前面些评论可能全然没有抓住要领，这本书充满智慧的喜悦，书中肉贩、面包师和做烛台的工匠让位给了巧克力饼干的品牌经理、职业规划顾问、研究火箭的科学家、画家、会计和军用飞机的供应商。

首先，德波顿确实很幽默。比如，他这样描述Mojave沙漠酒店的游泳池(他曾在探访飞机废品堆放场途中修理过)：“不幸的是，大部分游泳池的预算都浪费在路旁它超大的电子显示牌上了，剩下的钱就干不了什么正事了。”

第二，德波顿提醒我们，我们从来不想一想我们的Moments饼干和我们的毛绒拖鞋，我们16GB的iPhone和我们的泰式红咖喱鸡饭是从哪儿来的，还有我们从来不考虑从马尔代夫边上的印度洋里的一条鱼几天之内变成英国西部的Bristol郊区超市生鲜区独立包装好的金枪鱼排，这其中有多少一连串不同的人的劳动。这自然是个奇迹，德波顿对就对在很把这件事当奇迹看待。

最后，关于工作本身，作者说了很多发人深省的话，他把举的例子中最蠢的尖刻地称作“三千年前古埃及的劳工部悠长历史的顶点”。我们不需要像动物那样为下一餐而拼命。但与其花时间学瑞典语或者微积分，我们经常还是选择把时间用在老一套的事情上。

不过就算最无聊的办公室也有它的重要性。“工作的开始意味着自由的结束，也同时是疑惑、不安和任性的欲望的终结……早上花几个小时逼自己想问题一直很孤单，相对而言，被同事的问题困住是多么惬意啊，而且永远都不会孤单了。”最后这一点太发自肺腑、太深刻了，我们只有建议德波顿自己不要再孤军奋战，加入办公室的快乐生活吧。

(完)

………………………………

德波顿是我很喜爱的作家
一年前他的新书The pleasures and sorrows of work刚上市
我就写了博客介绍这本书还翻译了这篇经济学人的书评
当时困难重重几乎翻译不下去
很多句子不忍卒读向被我的翻译折磨的朋友说声对不起

这两天终于拿到书这篇书评里面很多内容便恍然大悟了
再润色起来就水到渠成轻松好多
不过肯定还有诸多不妥希望大家不吝赐教

译文和原文见 http://goo.gl/2cuk
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[CFO.com] 斯蒂格利茨：GDP使我们对经济危机失去判断力

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:02:05 +0800

宏观经济
斯蒂格利茨：GDP使我们对经济危机失去判断力

诺贝尔奖获得者经济学家约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨解释了，为何在次贷危机发生之前我们对GDP指标的依赖掩盖了病态的经济

玛丽·连恩, CFO.com | 美国
2009年09月29日

诺贝尔奖获得者约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨和阿玛雅·森领导的一个由顶级经济学家组成的顾问团发布报告称，金融危机席卷全球这么出乎人们意外，原因之一可能是我们的监控系统失灵了。市场参与者与政府官员并没有把注意力放在正确的统计指标上。

这项由法国总统萨科奇委任的调查指出，一个主要的失误是，GDP被作为经典指标广泛引用，它不能很好地衡量总体福祉，这其实有一段时间了。

简单说，GDP衡量一个经济体的经济水平，由其提供的货物和服务的定价价值来体现。但长期以来这个指标的缺陷存在争议；即它没有算上财富分配不均、自然资源消耗、地下经济和货物服务的质量。

斯蒂格利茨、森和他们的同事说，比起经济危机以前，这个缺陷现在有助于我们更佳了解美国乃至世界经济现状。斯蒂格利茨上周五在Labaton Sucharow主办的一个讨论会上称，“在以绩效为导向的社会，你衡量的指标会影响你做的事情。如果你衡量错误的指标就会做错事。”

斯蒂格利茨认为，核心问题是GDP的计算中掺入了假的利润。他指出，比如，2007年所有公司利润有41%由金融业贡献而且与负债相关联。换言之，这些收益都是向未来借的债啊。

结果，2008年金融机构计入的大量次贷相关损失榨干了2007年和前五年的利润。斯蒂格利茨说，“这些年的利润其实是空中楼阁，我们还以为是好年景。”

不仅如此，在经济危机的泡沫急剧增长之时，产出或资本比实际上的价值要高很多，比如不动产高出了30%强。所以用来计算GDP的所有货物与服务的价值“被高估”了，斯蒂格利茨总结说。

他还补充道，GDP作为衡量可持续发展的指标也有缺陷，因为2003年至2007年间美国消费的繁荣是基于负债的，而通过借债来产生消费是不能持续的。

还有一个基本衡量指标上的失误和家庭收入有关。排除通胀因素，中等家庭收入2008年跌至50,303美元，比2000年少了4%而且还在继续快速下降。斯蒂格利茨说，这是一个惊人的数字，因为同时期人均GDP已经从2000年的33,700美元上升至2008年的38,100美元(排除通胀因素)。

美国社会正在加剧的财富不均，导致这两个指标背道而驰，这可以解释为什么这个趋势违反直觉。这暗示着GDP增长的同时大部分公民的生活水准在下降。

还有一个问题是在诸如医疗保健部门，GDP计入了投入但忽视了产出。所以当经济效率降低时，由于有更多钱花，投入和GDP就增长，“但你真正关心的东西正在走下坡路，”包括大家的健康，斯蒂格利茨认为。

医疗保健花销现在占美国GDP的16%，这个百分比在稳步上升但“美国的健康产出并不和投入相对应，”他说。这意味着其他国家钱花得少效果还好——比如法国只花了占GDP11%的医疗投入就在预期寿命和其他健康指标上领先美国。

斯蒂格利茨还强调了与气候变化相关的可持续发展，特别是美国和其他国家给自然资源定的“错误价格”。“我们的定价系统基于一个前提，即有一个我们最稀缺的资源不值一文，我们知道这是错误的，”他说。

这个最稀缺的资源就是清洁的空气。斯蒂格利茨的理由是，工厂和汽车排放二氧化碳被认为是导致全球变暖的主要原因，而地球大气吸收二氧化碳的能力是有限的。

他说，许多专家认为二氧化碳排放应被定价在每吨80至100美元。只有美国最终这样考虑把碳排放的经济成本因素，才能影响和化石能源生产相关的所有东西。否则价格将会始终扭曲。

斯蒂格利茨说，“我们的会计框架影响了我们对世界的认知，而这个框架是有瑕疵的。”美国前总统克林顿为游说使用能反映自然资源消耗的指标设立经济委员会，斯蒂格利茨是这个委员会的成员。“国会说如果我们这么做就不提供资金，我当时就知道这是一件重要的事情。如果我们不为碳定价的话，碳产业是非常顽固的。”

在1929年经济大萧条之后，GDP被用来衡量股票市场行情。但这些年来，它正在逐渐成为衡量社会运行得如何的指标，“而这是两件迥然不同的事情，”斯蒂格利茨说。他劝告市场参与者避免用股票市场作为衡量经济健康程度的标准，特别是经济低迷期。“用股票市场来衡量整体经济的运行情况非常糟糕，”他解释说。

斯蒂格利茨说，正在下降的工资可能会支撑股票市场。现在的情况是：考虑到工资有更大的下行压力，现在美国实际失业率很可能比官方的9.7%要高很多，工资下降可以使单个公司短期利润提高但最终会减少需求总量，妨碍经济强劲复苏。

今天的股票市场价格看上去也很高，这是因为美联储意识到经济还未强劲反弹所以保持利率处于低位。低利率自然妨碍了投资者寻求合理回报。斯蒂格利茨问大家，“你是想银行存款为零呢，还是把钱放到股票市场搏一把？”

CFO.com原文页面 http://goo.gl/zBre
我的译文 http://goo.gl/wrIh

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[经济学人] 平板电脑：乔布斯的本本

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:02:26 +0800

平板电脑
乔布斯的本本
苹果已经颠覆了一个接一个产业，它现在想一口气颠覆三个

2010年1月28日 | 经济学人印刷版

苹果经常被选为全球最具创新力的公司，而它的创造性比较特别。苹果擅长把已有但尚未成熟的概念拿出来展示给世界，看看它是怎么做得那么到位的。在史蒂夫·乔布斯这位激情澎湃而又高瞻远瞩的老板带领下，苹果已经干过三回了。1984年苹果发布了Macintosh。它不是第一台图形化界面、由鼠标操控的电脑，但却把这些概念组合成了一个实用的产品。接着，2001年，iPod诞生了。它不是第一款数字音乐播放器，但它简约优雅，数字音乐从此成为主流。2007年苹果继续发布了iPhone。它不是第一款智能手机，但苹果没有重蹈其他手持设备制造商们的覆辙，iPhone大获全胜，使移动上网和手机下载软件成了大众市场上的奇迹。

竞争者们纷纷效法，计算机、音乐和电信产业从此被颠覆。现在乔布斯想第四次上演相同戏法。1月27日他揭开了苹果新产品iPad的面纱。这是一款纤薄的平板电脑，配备有10英寸的触摸屏，将于三月下旬上市，售价在499到829美金之间(见文章)。打造iPad历时数年，这几个月它成了热门话题，网上的预测火爆得几近歇斯底里：博客圈甚至戏称iPad为耶稣平板。

对苹果的热情可能有点过头了，不过乔布斯证明了他有点石成金的能力。这次平板计算踌躇满志，要同时颠覆三个产业——计算、电信和媒体。

前两个产业里的公司对iPad的到来不无恐惧，苹果的历史证明了自己是一个可怕的对手。相反，媒体产业却欢呼雀跃，真心欢迎iPad的到来。网上的盗版、免费内容和广告流失让媒体公司日子很难过。它们对亚马逊的电子阅读器Kindle热情渐消，因为Kindle拉低了书价还不能放广告，所以就指望iPad这个新玩意能鼓励人们在移动中看电子书报杂志，好让它们重获新生。有担心认为苹果会像在数字音乐市场那样，在这些市场上滥用它的势力，不管怎样，一个被由苹果开创并掌控的市场也好过一个正在缩水的市场，甚至是没有市场。

让平板电脑来得更猛烈些吧

针对商务人士设计的平板电脑从没成功过。微软这些年一直在推这个，收效甚微。苹果自己也在1993年推出过用笔写的平板电脑“牛顿”，折戟而返。Kindle表现中规中矩，跟着一大批的名字一样傻的机器也来了，包括Nook、Skiff和Que。与此同时，苹果的口袋机iPhone和iPod Touch作为音乐和视频播放器和手持游戏机已有不少斩获。

本质上iPad是一款大号的iPhone。它的大屏幕用来看电子书和视频很合适，它还从iPhone那儿直接继承了很多游戏和软件。苹果希望人们拿它代替笔记本电脑，如果能实现，苹果就将为这样的设备打开一个新的市场：比电话大，比笔记本小，个头是电子书阅读器、音乐和视频播放器、游戏机的两倍。各大产业已经在向这个市场汇聚：手机制造商们在发布迷你笔记本电脑，也就是上网本，计算机制造商们则在推出智能手机。新进入市场的公司比如Google就向智能手机和笔记本进军，手中已有Kindle的亚马逊也在加入战局：亚马逊刚发布了iPhone风格的“应用程序商店”，这样Kindle就不只是个阅读器了。

根据以往的经验推测，苹果进入这个新领域不仅加剧了设备制造商之间的竞争，也促使小心谨慎的消费者和出版商下定决心投入电子书阅读器的洪流，加快新兴科技被接受的步伐。据iSuppli市场调查公司的数据，今年电子书阅读器的销售额预计达到1200万美元，2008和2009年这个数字只有一百万和五百万。

抓住前面的救命本本

平板电脑能拯救苦苦挣扎的媒体公司吗？答案很杯具，不能。比如一些都市报纸太依赖分类广告了，而广告正在转投专门的网站，这样一来报纸就气数已尽了。其他一些早就走得更远。平板电脑很贵，要广为使用以实现其抱负仍需时日。理论上，一份报纸可以让它的读者订阅两年的电子版，用来补助平板电脑的费用。但这么做代价极高，而印刷成本高昂的出版社仍将指望坚持看纸版的读者群。

当然，平板电脑虽然不能救活比较弱的媒体公司，却很可能会助实力强的公司以一臂之力。为内容付费，在互联网上很难，而在平板电脑上可能会相对容易。人们已经准备好为在Kindle上阅读报纸杂志(包括经济学人)付费了。iPad有彩屏还能和苹果的在线应用商店紧密集成，下载书报杂志和下载音乐一样简单而受欢迎。最重要的是，它可以投放广告，尤其是美国杂志商很依赖这一点。平板电脑可能最终引导数字内容转向批发，这样报纸和书籍出版商就可以减少印刷从而节约成本了。

如果乔布斯能再成功地变一次戏法，媒体公司用这款风靡大众的产品所进行的数字革命带来的效益会很快超过成本。当然有些媒体公司行将就木，不管什么新玩意也不能让它们起死回生了，就算是耶稣平板也无法创造奇迹。

经济学人原文 http://goo.gl/KMcM
我的译文 http://goo.gl/7Cho...

[经济学人] 苹果揭开iPad面纱

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:01:16 +0800

苹果揭开iPad面纱
史蒂夫·乔布斯与平板电脑的未来
苹果的新玩意成为另一个改变游戏规则的搅局者

2010年01月28日 | 旧金山 | 经济学人印刷版

旧金山Yerba Buena艺术中心当季的主题之一叫“英雄与史诗”，这里向来以展出挑战传统的现代艺术家的作品而自豪。1月27日，周三，计算产业大亨、苹果公司老板史蒂夫·乔布斯在这里举办新产品iPad发布会。乔布斯之前已有一系列展示非传统产品的历史。他没有让人失望。

iPad看起来像加大号的苹果iPhone，它拥有一块10英寸（25厘米）的傲人彩屏，志在改变计算世界的版图。它仅有半英寸厚，重1.5磅（680克）。乔布斯评价iPad说，“与笔记本电脑比起来它和你更亲密无间，功能又比智能手机更强劲，” 这款产品将于三月底上市。

评论很快指出了iPad的几项重要缺陷：没有摄像头、没有电话功能、单任务。但苹果应该可以在适当的时候纠正这些不足。而其他一大批支持触摸屏的“平板电脑”会在接下来一年里陆续上市，这可能会使在家中、学校和办公室里的数字媒体消费发生革命性变化。

这些新玩意如洪水般涌来，势必对已经被互联网搅得天翻地覆的媒体产业产生深远影响。对传统报纸杂志出版商来说，从传统印刷转向数字的改变并不轻松。读者们一直不想为网上的内容掏腰包。公司也不情愿像在平面媒体那样在网上投放广告——这不奇怪，网上给的地方就那么大。iPad可能会加速从纸版到数字板内容的转变，加剧媒体行业短期阵痛。而出版商们期待着平板电脑成为21世纪印刷纸张的替代品，用动人的方式去呈现它们提供的内容，然后收钱。德勤咨询的Phil Asmundson说：“这对出版商来说是焕发第二春的绝好机会。”

如此一来，苹果已经吸引了一些最赚钱的媒体品牌加入iPad平台也不足为奇了。乔布斯在演讲中提到苹果已经和业界领先的出版商，比如企鹅和西蒙舒斯特公司达成合作协议，为iPad提供书籍，这些书可以在苹果新的iBook在线书店买到。iPad将带有诸如纽约时报的电子版，在发布时作了应用演示。三月份正式上市前会有更多的协议将签署。

苹果的媒体伙伴们和乔布斯打交道无疑心情纠结。苹果通过iTunes商店掌控数字下载市场，在音乐产业现在已经被大家妖魔化了。它已经可以呼风唤雨，控制音乐的价格，提高iPod的销量，还不带唱片公司混。有人说，苹果确实提供了音乐产业通过网上销售赚钱的途径，尽管后者至今避免这么做。苹果轻薄的iPhone也给大量的内容制造者一个平台，通过软件来赚钱。

这家公司的历史证明了它能够使得计算行业最狂热的梦想变成现实。科技公司一直在努力开发平板电脑和类似的设备，但在笔记本电脑和手机之间的区域一直是这些制造商们的“百慕大三角”。终点科技咨询公司的Roger Key说，“在那块区域发布的产品经常会从雷达屏幕上消失”。

这其中就有上一代平板风格的电脑。早在上世纪90年代包括苹果在内的很多公司都在开发这种电脑。当看到苹果的牛顿PDA没指望的时候，乔布斯当时就毙了这个项目。后来微软的比尔·盖茨预言平板电脑将很快成为人们主要的计算工具——当然，由微软的软件驱动，这时平板电脑再次短暂得出现在聚光灯下。但消费者被其高昂的售价、粗鄙的界面和有限的功能吓回去了。平板电脑和普通个人电脑一样贵，所以一直是一个利基产品，主要用于医疗和建筑行业。

为什么平板电脑现在让大家这么兴奋呢？原因之一是显示技术、电池和微处理技术的创新大大降低了成本。苹果的iPad基本版售价499美金，配备大容量存储和无线连接版本的为829美金，一般的消费者也能买得起。还有一个的原因是界面改善了很多：iPad配备一个大的虚拟键盘，有需要的时候就会弹出来，还支持多点触摸，两个手指可以缩放图片。而且人们正在习惯于购买消费数字形式的内容，这也有助于平板电脑的普及。（见图）

美国电子阅读器销量（百万美元）

这些都解释了为什么其他很多厂商也在觊觎平板电脑市场。这个月早些时候拉斯维加斯消费电子展上，一大批平板电脑原型都被拿来参展，包括摩托罗拉、联想和戴尔的产品。NVIDIA芯片制造商的总裁Huang Jen-Hsun说这是他第一次看到电信厂商、计算机制造商和消费电子厂商同时热衷于生产同样的产品。他说：“平板电脑是第一个真正全方位融合的电子产品”。

上网本和电子书

iPad和其他平板电脑可能撼动整个计算产业。有观察认为平板电脑可能会减少低端电脑包括苹果的MacBook的销量。但它们更有可能抢占上网本的市场。上网本价格低廉，小巧便携，主要用来上网和看视频，近来势头很猛，据DisplaySearch市场调研公司的调查，全球上网本销量去年大增72%至114亿美元，使其成为一个目标市场。

尽管亚马逊的Kindle现在还受大多数爱书如命的书虫们欢迎，iPad也暗地里对其他的电子阅读器构成了威胁。苹果早就想着进入平板电脑市场，电子阅读器制造商们得考虑把他们的产品做得更灵活更激动人心。Que proReader制造商Plastic Logic公司的Richard Archuleta说：“未来五年你会看到更多使用彩屏并且可以看视频的阅读器“。最近亚马逊决定让第三方开发者在Kindle系列产品上开发软件，其他的电子阅读器厂商很可能会效仿。

图书出版商们静静地祈祷苹果杀入电子阅读器市场能削弱亚马逊的地位：Forrester市场调查公司称，Kindle在这一市场仍占据着60%的份额。出版商们对平板电脑能呈现更多样化的媒体组合兴奋不已。Vook公司能把文本与视频及社交网络链接组合在一起，公司老板Bradley Inman相信iPad将会触发创造力的极大释放。他说：“iPad就好像在电影中加入声音、电视中增加色彩一样影响深远”。

报纸杂志出版商同样看好平板电脑的潜力。它们最大的心愿是从平板电脑的读者和广告商那里获得收入。事实证明人们愿意为电子阅读器上长期的新闻付费，但现有设备不允许出版商创造性地展示其内容，大多数也无法投放广告。Hearst出版公司新的创业公司Skiff是个例外，它的11.5英寸屏足够展示杂志设计的所有细节并且可以安放广告。

很好，但是在哪儿关呢？

苹果进入平板电脑市场还意味着出版商得为它生产数字内容，就像为电子阅读器和智能手机做的那样。很多公司会力不从心或者不想做，这就为Zinio这样的公司发展创造了契机，Zinnio搞了一个数字出版的模型叫Unity，它吸收出版商的内容，重新发布到不同的设备上并存储到“云”里，所谓云，就是指共享数据处理能力的巨大的池子。用户一次支付内容就可以从不同的Zinio支持的设备中访问它，从而增大了内容的消费几率。

苹果还希望iPad成为一款受欢迎的游戏机，苹果的140,000个应用程序里很多游戏都可以在iPad上直接玩。苹果还为iPad专门修改了iWork套装，提供字处理、工作表和演示软件以吸引商务人士。

见证了苹果公司股价飙升的股东们当然希望iPad能永垂IT业青史。苹果这次经受住了经济衰退的考验，1月25日它公布了其34年历史上最好的季报，收入157亿美金，利润34亿美金，分别比上一年增长了32%和49%。股东们会一直默念上帝保佑iPad成为另一个十亿美元收入的重量级产品而不是像Apple TV那样倒下。不管怎样，乔布斯足以证明可以登上Yerba Buena艺术中心的英雄榜了。

经济学人原文 http://goo.gl/2Oo8
译言上我的译文 http://goo.gl/ntTg
苹果iPad官网 http://www.apple.com/iPad

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德鲁克百年 | The Way Ahead

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:11:42 +0800

The Economist
The Way Ahead

The time to get ready for the next society is now

By Peter F. Drucker

November 1, 2001

The next society has not quite arrived yet, but it has got far enough for action to be considered in the following areas:

The future corporation. Enterprises—including a good many non-businesses, such as universities—should start experimenting with new corporate forms and conducting a few pilot studies, especially in working with alliances, partners and joint ventures, and in defining new structures and new tasks for top management. New models are also needed for geographical and product diversification for multinational companies, and for balancing concentration and diversification.
People policies. The way people are managed almost everywhere assumes that the workforce is still largely made up of people who are employed by the enterprise and work full-time for it until they are fired, quit, retire or die. Yet already in many organisations as many as two-fifths of the people who work there are not employees and do not work full-time.

Today's human-resources managers also still assume that the most desirable and least costly employees are young ones. In America, especially, older people, and particularly older managers and professionals, have been pushed into early retirement to make room for younger people who are believed to cost less or to have more up-to-date skills. The results of this policy have not been encouraging. Generally speaking, after two years wage costs per employee for the younger recruits tend to be back where they were before the “oldies” were pushed out, if not higher. The number of salaried employees seems to be going up at least as fast as production or sales, which means that the new young hires are no more productive than the old ones were. But in any event, demography will make the present policy increasingly self-defeating and expensive.

The first need is for a people policy that covers all those who work for an enterprise, whether they are employed by it or not. After all, the performance of every single one of them matters. So far, no one seems to have devised a satisfactory solution to this problem. Second, enterprises must attract, hold and make productive people who have reached official retirement age, have become independent outside contractors or are not available as full-time permanent employees. For example, highly skilled and educated older people, instead of being retired, might be offered a choice of continuing relationships that convert them into long-term “inside outsiders”, preserving their skill and knowledge for the enterprise and yet giving them the flexibility and freedom they expect and can afford.

There is a model for this, but it comes from academia rather than business: the professor emeritus, who has vacated his chair and no longer draws a salary. He remains free to teach as much as he wants, but gets paid only for what he does. Many emeriti do retire altogether, but perhaps as many as half continue to teach part-time, and many continue to do full-time research. A similar arrangement might well suit senior professionals in a business. A big American corporation is currently trying out such an arrangement for older top-level people in its law and tax departments, in research and development and in staff jobs. But for people in operating work, eg, sales or manufacturing, something different needs to be developed.

Outside information. Perhaps surprisingly, it can be argued that the information revolution has caused managements to be less well informed than they were before. They have more data, to be sure, but most of the information so readily made available by IT is about internal company matters. As this survey has shown, though, the most important changes affecting an institution today are likely to be outside ones, about which present information systems offer few clues.
One reason is that information about the outside world is not usually available in computer-useable form. It is not codified, nor is it usually quantified. This is why IT people, and their executive customers, tend to scorn information about the outside world as “anecdotal”. Moreover, far too many managers assume, wrongly, that the society they have known all their lives will remain the same forever.
Outside information is now becoming available on the Internet. Although this is still in totally disorganised form, it is now possible for managements to ask what outside information they need, as a first step towards devising a proper information system for collecting relevant information about the outside world.
Change agents. To survive and succeed, every organisation will have to turn itself into a change agent. The most effective way to manage change successfully is to create it. But experience has shown that grafting innovation on to a traditional enterprise does not work. The enterprise has to become a change agent. This requires the organised abandonment of things that have been shown to be unsuccessful, and the organised and continuous improvement of every product, service and process within the enterprise (which the Japanese call kaizen). It requires the exploitation of successes, especially unexpected and unplanned-for ones, and it requires systematic innovation. The point of becoming a change agent is that it changes the mindset of the entire organisation. Instead of seeing change as a threat, its people will come to consider it as an opportunity.

And then?

So much for getting ready for the future that we can already see taking shape. But what about future trends and events we are not even aware of yet? If there is one thing that can be forecast with confidence, it is that the future will turn out in unexpected ways.

Take, for example, the information revolution. Almost everybody is sure of two things about it: first, that it is proceeding with unprecedented speed; and second, that its effects will be more radical than anything that has gone before. Wrong, and wrong again. Both in its speed and its impact, the information revolution uncannily resembles its two predecessors within the past 200 years, the first industrial revolution of the later 18th and early 19th centuries and the second industrial revolution in the late 19th century.

The first industrial revolution, triggered by James Watt's improved steam engine in the mid-1770s, immediately had an enormous impact on the West's imagination, but it did not produce many social and economic changes until the invention of the railroad in 1829, and of pre-paid postal service and of the telegraph in the decade thereafter. Similarly, the invention of the computer in the mid-1940s, the information revolution's equivalent of the steam engine, stimulated people's imagination, but it was not until 40 years later, with the spread of the Internet in the 1990s, that the information revolution began to bring about big economic and social changes.

Equally, today we are puzzled and alarmed by the growing inequality in income and wealth and by the emergence of the “super-rich”, such as Microsoft's Bill Gates. Yet the same sudden and inexplicable growth in inequality, and the same emergence of the “super-rich” of their day, characterised both the first and the second industrial revolutions. Relative to the average income and average wealth of their time and country, those earlier super-rich were a good deal richer than a Bill Gates is relative to today's average income and wealth in America.

These parallels are close and striking enough to make it almost certain that, as in the earlier industrial revolutions, the main effects of the information revolution on the next society still lie ahead. The decades of the 19th century following the first and second industrial revolutions were the most innovative and most fertile periods since the 16th century for the creation of new institutions and new theories. The first industrial revolution turned the factory into the central production organisation and the main creator of wealth. Factory workers became the first new social class since the appearance of knights in armour more than 1,000 years earlier. The house of Rothschild, which emerged as the world's dominant financial power after 1810, was not only the first investment bank but also the first multinational company since the 15th century Hanseatic League and the Medici. The first industrial revolution brought forth, among many other things, intellectual property, universal incorporation, limited liability, the trade union, the co-operative, the technical university and the daily newspaper. The second industrial revolution produced the modern civil service and the modern corporation, the commercial bank, the business school, and the first non-menial jobs outside the home for women.

The two industrial revolutions also bred new theories and new ideologies. The Communist Manifesto was a response to the first industrial revolution; the political theories that together shaped the 20th-century democracies—Bismarck's welfare state, Britain's Christian Socialism and Fabians, America's regulation of business—were all responses to the second one. So was Frederick Winslow Taylor's “scientific management” (starting in 1881), with its productivity explosion.

Big ideas

Following the information revolution, once again we see the emergence of new institutions and new theories. The new economic regions—the European Union, NAFTA and the proposed Free-Trade Area of the Americas—are neither traditionally free-trade nor traditionally protectionist. They attempt a new balance between the two, and between the economic sovereignty of the national state and supranational economic decision-making. Equally, there is no real precedent for the Citigroups, Goldman Sachses or ING Barings that have come to dominate world finance. They are not multinational but transnational. The money they deal in is almost totally beyond the control of any country's government or central bank.

And then there is the upsurge in interest in Joseph Schumpeter's postulates of “dynamic disequilibrium” as the economy's only stable state; of the innovator's “creative destruction” as the economy's driving force; and of new technology as the main, if not the only, economic change agent—the very antithesis of earlier economic theories based on the idea of equilibrium as a healthy economy's norm, monetary and fiscal policies as the drivers of a modern economy and technology as an “externality”.

All this suggests that the greatest changes are almost certainly still ahead of us. We can also be sure that the society of 2030 will be very different from that of today, and that it will bear little resemblance to that predicted by today's best-selling futurists. It will not be dominated or even shaped by information technology. IT will, of course, be important, but it will be only one of several important new technologies. The central feature of the next society, as of its predecessors, will be new institutions and new theories, ideologies and problems.

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德鲁克百年 | What Executives Should Remember

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:11:25 +0800

What Executives Should Remember

by Peter F. Drucker

No management thinker was as prolific or as profound as Peter Drucker. Here is some of the savviest advice he offered executives.

Editors’ note: Peter Drucker flourished in what is often called the information age, but his writings offered far more thinking than data. In dozens of sharply written essays for Harvard Business Review and other publications, he delved into executives’ basic challenges and opportunities. The payoff in his articles rarely came from a research finding or little-known fact. Instead, it came from his ideas, which confronted common assumptions about business and people. And he urged readers to follow his lead and take on the hard work of thinking—always combined, he insisted, with decisive action.

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born in Vienna in 1909, the son of a high-level civil servant in the Hapsburg empire. World War I left Vienna with little opportunity to offer him, so after he finished school, he worked in Germany, first in banking and then in journalism. While he was there, he also earned a doctorate in international law. The rise of Nazism forced him to leave Germany in 1933; after four years in London, he moved for good to the United States, where he became a professor as well as a freelance writer.

His career as a business thinker took off in the 1940s, when his initial writings on politics and society won him access to the internal workings of General Motors, then one of the largest companies in the world. His experiences in Europe had left him fascinated with the problem of authority, a fascination shared by Donaldson Brown, the mastermind behind the administrative controls at GM. Brown invited him in to conduct what might be called a political audit. The resulting Concept of the Corporation popularized GM’s multidivisional structure and led to numerous articles, consulting engagements, and additional books.

A knowledge worker himself, Drucker was particularly interested in the growing importance of people who worked with their minds rather than their hands. He was intrigued by employees who knew more about certain subjects than their bosses or colleagues but who still had to cooperate with others in a large organization. Rather than simply glorify the phenomenon as the epitome of human progress, Drucker analyzed it and explained how it challenged the common thinking about how organizations should be run.

His approach worked well in the increasingly mature business world of the second half of the twentieth century. By that time, large corporations had developed the basic manufacturing efficiencies and managerial hierarchies of mass production. Executives had come to think they knew how to run companies, and Drucker took it upon himself to poke holes in their beliefs, lest organizations become stale. But he did so in a sympathetic way. He assumed that his readers were intelligent, rational, hardworking people of goodwill. If their organizations struggled, he believed it was usually because of outdated ideas, a narrow conception of a problem, or internal misunderstandings. His insights were well suited to Harvard Business Review’s format—practical, idea-based essays for executives—and his clear-eyed, humanistic writing enriched the magazine time and again. He helped us all think broadly and deeply.

The Theory of the Business

>> Excerpted from September–October 1994

The root cause of nearly every one of these [business] crises is not that things are being done poorly. It is not even that the wrong things are being done. Indeed, in most cases, the right things are being done—but fruitlessly. What accounts for this apparent paradox? The assumptions on which the organization has been built and is being run no longer fit reality. These are the assumptions that shape any organization’s behavior, dictate its decisions about what to do and what not to do, and define what the organization considers meaningful results. These assumptions are about markets. They are about identifying customers and competitors, their values and behavior. They are about technology and its dynamics, about a company’s strengths and weaknesses. These assumptions are about what a company gets paid for. They are what I call a company’s theory of the business…

Whenever a big organization gets into trouble—and especially if it has been successful for many years—people blame sluggishness, complacency, arrogance, mammoth bureaucracies. A plausible explanation? Yes. But rarely the relevant or correct one…

For 70 years, [General Motors’ theory of the business] worked like a charm. Even in the depths of the Depression, GM never suffered a loss while steadily gaining market share. But in the late 1970s, its assumptions about the market and about production became invalid. The market was fragmenting into highly volatile “lifestyle” segments. Income became one factor among many in the buying decision, not the only one. At the same time, lean manufacturing created an economics of small scale. It made short runs and variations in models less costly and more profitable than long runs of uniform products.

GM knew all this but simply could not believe it. (GM’s union still doesn’t.) Instead, the company tried to patch things over. It maintained the existing divisions based on income segmentation, but each division now offered a “car for every purse.” It tried to compete with lean manufacturing’s economics of small scale by automating the large-scale, long-run mass production (losing some billion in the process). Contrary to popular belief, GM patched things over with prodigious energy, hard work, and lavish investments of time and money. But patching only confused the customer, the dealer, and the employees and management of GM itself. In the meantime, GM neglected its real growth market, where it had leadership and would have been almost unbeatable: light trucks and minivans…

…Traditionally, we have searched for the miracle worker with a magic wand to turn an ailing organization around. To establish, maintain, and restore a theory, however, does not require a Genghis Khan or a Leonardo da Vinci in the executive suite. It is not genius; it is hard work. It is not being clever; it is being conscientious. It is what CEOs are paid for.

There are indeed quite a few CEOs who have successfully changed their theory of the business. The CEO who built Merck into the world’s most successful pharmaceutical business by focusing solely on the research and development of patented, high-margin breakthrough drugs radically changed the company’s theory by acquiring a large distributor of generic and nonprescription drugs. He did so without a “crisis,” while Merck was ostensibly doing very well. Similarly, a few years ago, the new CEO of Sony, the world’s best-known manufacturer of consumer electronic hardware, changed the company’s theory of the business. He acquired a Hollywood movie production company and, with that acquisition, shifted the organization’s center of gravity from being a hardware manufacturer in search of software to being a software producer that creates a market demand for hardware.

But for every one of these apparent miracle workers, there are scores of equally capable CEOs whose organizations stumble. We can’t rely on miracle workers to rejuvenate an obsolete theory of the business any more than we can rely on them to cure other types of serious illness. And when one talks to these supposed miracle workers, they deny vehemently that they act by charisma, vision, or, for that matter, the laying on of hands. They start out with diagnosis and analysis. They accept that attaining objectives and rapid growth demand a serious rethinking of the theory of the business. They do not dismiss unexpected failure as the result of a subordinate’s incompetence or as an accident but treat it as a symptom of “systems failure.” They do not take credit for unexpected success but treat it as a challenge to their assumptions.

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德鲁克百年 | Managing Oneself

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:11:16 +0800

Managing Oneself

Key ideas from the Harvard Business Review article by Peter F. Drucker

The Idea in Brief

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you've got ambition, drive, and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession--regardless of where you started out. But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren't managing their knowledge workers' careers. Rather, we must each be our own chief executive officer.

Simply put, it's up to you to carve out your place in the work world and know when to change course. And it's up to you to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.

To do all of these things well, you'll need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself. What are your most valuable strengths and most dangerous weaknesses? Equally important, how do you learn and work with others? What are your most deeply held values? And in what type of work environment can you make the greatest contribution?

The implication is clear: Only when you operate from a combination of your strengths and self-knowledge can you achieve true--and lasting--excellence.

The Idea in Practice

To build a life of excellence, begin by asking yourself these questions:

"What Are My Strengths?"

To accurately identify your strengths, use feedback analysis. Every time you make a key decision, write down the outcome you expect. Several months later, compare the actual results with your expected results. Look for patterns in what you're seeing: What results are you skilled at generating? What abilities do you need to enhance in order to get the results you want? What unproductive habits are preventing you from creating the outcomes you desire? In identifying opportunities for improvement, don't waste time cultivating skill areas where you have little competence. Instead, concentrate on--and build on--your strengths.

"How Do I Work?"

In what ways do you work best? Do you process information most effectively by reading it, or by hearing others discuss it? Do you accomplish the most by working with other people, or by working alone? Do you perform best while making decisions, or while advising others on key matters? Are you in top form when things get stressful, or do you function optimally in a highly predictable environment?

"What Are My Values?"

What are your ethics? What do you see as your most important responsibilities for living a worthy, ethical life? Do your organization's ethics resonate with your own values? If not, your career will likely be marked by frustration and poor performance.

"Where Do I Belong?"

Consider your strengths, preferred work style, and values. Based on these qualities, in what kind of work environment would you fit in best? Find the perfect fit, and you'll transform yourself from a merely acceptable employee into a star performer.

"What Can I Contribute?"

In earlier eras, companies told businesspeople what their contribution should be. Today, you have choices. To decide how you can best enhance your organization's performance, first ask what the situation requires. Based on your strengths, work style, and values, how might you make the greatest contribution to your organization's efforts?

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德鲁克百年 | The New Demographics

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:11:42 +0800

The Economist
The New Demographics

How to live with an ageing population

By Peter F. Drucker

November 1, 2001

By 2030, people over 65 in Germany, the world's third-largest economy, will account for almost half the adult population, compared with one-fifth now. And unless the country's birth rate recovers from its present low of 1.3 per woman, over the same period its population of under-35s will shrink about twice as fast as the older population will grow. The net result will be that the total population, now 82m, will decline to 70m-73m. The number of people of working age will fall by a full quarter, from 40m today to 30m.

The German demographics are far from exceptional. In Japan, the world's second-largest economy, the population will peak in 2005, at around 125m. By 2050, according to the more pessimistic government forecasts, the population will have shrunk to around 95m. Long before that, around 2030, the share of the over-65s in the adult population will have grown to about half. And the birth rate in Japan, as in Germany, is down to 1.3 per woman.

The figures are pretty much the same for most other developed countries—Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Sweden—and for a good many emerging ones, especially China. In some regions, such as central Italy, southern France or southern Spain, birth rates are even lower than in Germany or Japan.

Life expectancy—and with it the number of older people—has been going up steadily for 300 years. But the decline in the number of young people is something new. The only developed country that has so far avoided this fate is America. But even there the birth rate is well below replacement level, and the proportion of older people in the adult population will rise steeply in the next 30 years.

All this means that winning the support of older people will become a political imperative in every developed country. Pensions have already become a regular election issue. There is also a growing debate about the desirability of immigration to maintain the population and workforce. Together these two issues are transforming the political landscape in every developed country.

By 2030 at the latest, the age at which full retirement benefits start will have risen to the mid-70s in all developed countries, and benefits for healthy pensioners will be substantially lower than they are today. Indeed, fixed retirement ages for people in reasonable physical and mental condition may have been abolished to prevent the pensions burden on the working population from becoming unbearable. Already young and middle-aged people at work suspect that there will not be enough pension money to go round when they themselves reach traditional retirement age. But politicians everywhere continue to pretend that they can save the current pensions system.

Needed but unwanted

Immigration is certain to be an even hotter issue. The respected DIW research institute in Berlin estimates that by 2020 Germany will have to import 1m immigrants of working age each year simply to maintain its workforce. Other rich European countries are in the same boat. And in Japan there is talk of admitting 500,000 Koreans each year—and sending them home five years later. For all big countries but America, immigration on such a scale is unprecedented.

The political implications are already being felt. In 1999 fellow Europeans were shocked by the electoral success in Austria of a xenophobic right-wing party whose main plank is “no immigration”. Similar movements are growing in Flemish-speaking Belgium, in traditionally liberal Denmark and in northern Italy. Even in America, immigration is upsetting long-established political alignments. American trade unions' opposition to large-scale immigration has put them in the anti-globalisation camp that organised violent protests during the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organisation in 1999. A future Democratic candidate for the American presidency may have to choose between getting the union vote by opposing immigration, or getting the vote of Latinos and other newcomers by supporting it. Equally, a future Republican candidate may have to choose between the support of business, which is clamouring for workers, and the vote of a white middle class that increasingly opposes immigration.

Even so, America's experience of immigration should give it a lead in the developed world for several decades to come. Since the 1970s it has been admitting large numbers of immigrants, either legally or illegally. Most immigrants are young, and the birth rates of first-generation immigrant women tend to be higher than those of their adopted country. This means that for the next 30 or 40 years America's population will continue to grow, albeit slowly, whereas in some other developed countries it will fall.

A country of immigrants

But it is not numbers alone that will give America an advantage. Even more important, the country is culturally attuned to immigration, and long ago learned to integrate immigrants into its society and economy. In fact, recent immigrants, whether Hispanics or Asians, may be integrating faster than ever. One-third of all recent Hispanic immigrants, for instance, are reported to be marrying non-Hispanics and non-immigrants. The one big obstacle to the full integration of recent immigrants in America is the poor performance of American public schools.

Among developed countries, only Australia and Canada have a tradition of immigration similar to America's. Japan has resolutely kept foreigners out, except for a spate of Korean immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s, whose descendants are still being discriminated against. The mass migrations of the 19th century were either into empty, unsettled spaces (such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil), or from farm to city within the same country. By contrast, immigration in the 21st century is by foreigners—in nationality, language, culture and religion—who move into settled countries. European countries have so far been less than successful at integrating such foreigners.

The biggest effect of the demographic changes may be to split hitherto homogeneous societies and markets. Until the 1920s or 30s, every country had a diversity of cultures and markets. They were sharply differentiated by class, occupation and residence, eg, “the farm market” or “the carriage trade”, both of which disappeared some time between 1920 and 1940. Yet since the second world war, all developed countries have had only one mass culture and one mass market. Now that demographic forces in all the developed countries are pulling in opposite directions, will that homogeneity survive?

The markets of the developed world have been dominated by the values, habits and preferences of the young population. Some of the most successful and most profitable businesses of the past half-century, such as Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble in America, Unilever in Britain and Henkel in Germany, owe their prosperity in large measure to the growth of the young population and to the high rate of family formation between 1950 and 2000. The same is true of the car industry over that period.

The end of the single market

Now there are signs that the market is splitting. In financial services, perhaps America's fastest-growing industry over the past 25 years, it has split already. The bubble market of the 1990s, with its frantic day-trading in high-tech stocks, belonged mainly to the under-45s. But the customers in the markets for investments, such as mutual funds or deferred annuities, tend to be over 50, and that market has also been growing apace. The fastest-growing industry in any developed country may turn out to be the continuing education of already well-educated adults, which is based on values that are all but incompatible with those of the youth culture.

But it is also conceivable that some youth markets will become exceedingly lucrative. In the coastal cities of China, where the government was able to enforce its one-child policy, middle-class families are now reported to spend more on their one child than earlier middle-class families spent on their four or five children together. This seems to be true in Japan too. Many American middle-class families are spending heavily on the education of their single child, mainly by moving into expensive suburban neighbourhoods with good schools. But this new luxury youth market is quite different from the homogeneous mass market of the past 50 years. That mass market is rapidly weakening because of the decline in the numbers of young people reaching adulthood.

In future there will almost certainly be two distinct workforces, broadly made up of the under-50s and the over-50s respectively. These two workforces are likely to differ markedly in their needs and behaviour, and in the jobs they do. The younger group will need a steady income from a permanent job, or at least a succession of full-time jobs. The rapidly growing older group will have much more choice, and will be able to combine traditional jobs, non-conventional jobs and leisure in whatever proportion suits them best.

The split into two workforces is likely to start with female knowledge technologists. A nurse, a computer technologist or a paralegal can take 15 years out to look after her children and then return to full-time work. Women, who now outnumber men in American higher education, increasingly look for work in the new knowledge technologies. Such jobs are the first in human history to be well adapted to the special needs of women as childbearers, and to their increasing longevity. That longevity is one of the reasons for the split in the job market. A 50-year working life—unprecedented in human history—is simply too long for one kind of work.

The second reason for the split is a shrinking life expectancy for businesses and organisations of all kinds. In the past, employing organisations have outlived employees. In future, employees, and especially knowledge workers, will increasingly outlive even successful organisations. Few businesses, or even government agencies or programmes, last for more than 30 years. Historically, the working lifespan of most employees has been less than 30 years because most manual workers simply wore out. But knowledge workers who enter the labour force in their 20s are likely to be still in good physical and mental shape 50 years later.

“Second career” and “second half of one's life” have already become buzzwords in America. Increasingly, employees there take early retirement as soon as their pension and Social Security (state retirement benefit) rights are guaranteed for the time when they reach traditional retirement age; but they do not stop working. Instead, their “second career” often takes an unconventional form. They may work freelance (and often forget to tell the taxman about their work, thus boosting their net income), or part-time, or as “temporaries”, or for an outsourcing contractor, or as contractors themselves. Such “early retirement to keep on working” is particularly common among knowledge workers, who are still a minority among people now reaching 50 or 55, but will become the largest single group of older people in America from about 2030.

Beware demographic changes

Population predictions for the next 20 years can be made with some certainty because almost everybody who will be in the workforce in 2020 is already alive. But, as American experience in the past couple of decades has shown, demographic trends can change quite suddenly and unpredictably, with fairly immediate effects. The American baby boom of the late 1940s, for instance, triggered the housing boom of the 1950s.

In the mid-1920s America had its first “baby bust”. Between 1925 and 1935 the birth rate declined by almost half, dipping below the replacement rate of 2.2 live births per woman. In the late 1930s, President Roosevelt's Commission on American Population (consisting of the country's most eminent demographers and statisticians) confidently predicted that America's population would peak in 1945 and would then start declining. But an exploding birth rate in the late 1940s proved it wrong. Within ten years, the number of live births per woman doubled from 1.8 to 3.6. Between 1947 and 1957, America experienced an astonishing “baby boom”. The number of babies born rose from 2.5m to 4.1m.

Then, in 1960-61, the opposite happened. Instead of the expected second-wave baby boom as the first boomers reached adulthood, there was a big bust. Between 1961 and 1975, the birth rate fell from 3.7 to 1.8. The number of babies born went down from 4.3m in 1960 to 3.1m in 1975. The next surprise was the “baby boom echo” in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The number of live births went up quite sharply, surpassing even the numbers of the first baby boom's peak years. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that this echo was triggered by large-scale immigration into America, beginning in the early 1970s. When the girls born to these early immigrants started having children of their own in the late 1980s, their birth rates were still closer to those of their parents' country of origin than to those of their adopted country. Fully one-fifth of all children of school age in California in the first decade of this century have at least one foreign-born parent.

But nobody knows what caused the two baby busts, or the baby boom of the 1940s. Both busts occurred when the economy was doing well, which in theory should have encouraged people to have lots of children. And the baby boom should never have happened, because historically birth rates have always gone down after a big war. The truth is that we simply do not understand what determines birth rates in modern societies. So demographics will not only be the most important factor in the next society, it will also be the least predictable and least controllable one.

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德鲁克百年 | The Next Society

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:11:40 +0800

The Economist
The Next Society

Tomorrow is closer than you think. Peter Drucker explains how it will differ from today, and what needs to be done to prepare for it

By Peter F. Drucker

November 1, 2001

The new economy may or may not materialise, but there is no doubt that the next society will be with us shortly. In the developed world, and probably in the emerging countries as well, this new society will be a good deal more important than the new economy (if any). It will be quite different from the society of the late 20th century, and also different from what most people expect. Much of it will be unprecedented. And most of it is already here, or is rapidly emerging.

In the developed countries, the dominant factor in the next society will be something to which most people are only just beginning to pay attention: the rapid growth in the older population and the rapid shrinking of the younger generation. Politicians everywhere still promise to save the existing pensions system, but they—and their constituents—know perfectly well that in another 25 years people will have to keep working until their mid-70s, health permitting.

What has not yet sunk in is that a growing number of older people—say those over 50—will not keep on working as traditional full-time nine-to-five employees, but will participate in the labour force in many new and different ways: as temporaries, as part-timers, as consultants, on special assignments and so on. What used to be personnel and are now known as human-resources departments still assume that those who work for an organisation are full-time employees. Employment laws and regulations are based on the same assumption. Within 20 or 25 years, however, perhaps as many as half the people who work for an organisation will not be employed by it, certainly not on a full-time basis. This will be especially true for older people. New ways of working with people at arm's length will increasingly become the central managerial issue of employing organisations, and not just of businesses.

The shrinking of the younger population will cause an even greater upheaval, if only because nothing like this has happened since the dying centuries of the Roman empire. In every single developed country, but also in China and Brazil, the birth rate is now well below the replacement rate of 2.2 live births per woman of reproductive age. Politically, this means that immigration will become an important—and highly divisive—issue in all rich countries. It will cut across all traditional political alignments. Economically, the decline in the young population will change markets in fundamental ways. Growth in family formation has been the driving force of all domestic markets in the developed world, but the rate of family formation is certain to fall steadily unless bolstered by large-scale immigration of younger people. The homogeneous mass market that emerged in all rich countries after the second world war has been youth-determined from the start. It will now become middle-age-determined, or perhaps more likely it will split into two: a middle-age-determined mass market and a much smaller youth-determined one. And because the supply of young people will shrink, creating new employment patterns to attract and hold the growing number of older people (especially older educated people) will become increasingly important.

Knowledge is all

The next society will be a knowledge society. Knowledge will be its key resource, and knowledge workers will be the dominant group in its workforce. Its three main characteristics will be:

Borderlessness, because knowledge travels even more effortlessly than money.
Upward mobility, available to everyone through easily acquired formal education.
The potential for failure as well as success. Anyone can acquire the “means of production”, ie, the knowledge required for the job, but not everyone can win.

Together, those three characteristics will make the knowledge society a highly competitive one, for organisations and individuals alike. Information technology, although only one of many new features of the next society, is already having one hugely important effect: it is allowing knowledge to spread near-instantly, and making it accessible to everyone. Given the ease and speed at which information travels, every institution in the knowledge society—not only businesses, but also schools, universities, hospitals and increasingly government agencies too—has to be globally competitive, even though most organisations will continue to be local in their activities and in their markets. This is because the Internet will keep customers everywhere informed on what is available anywhere in the world, and at what price.

This new knowledge economy will rely heavily on knowledge workers. At present, this term is widely used to describe people with considerable theoretical knowledge and learning: doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, chemical engineers. But the most striking growth will be in “knowledge technologists”: computer technicians, software designers, analysts in clinical labs, manufacturing technologists, paralegals. These people are as much manual workers as they are knowledge workers; in fact, they usually spend far more time working with their hands than with their brains. But their manual work is based on a substantial amount of theoretical knowledge which can be acquired only through formal education, not through an apprenticeship. They are not, as a rule, much better paid than traditional skilled workers, but they see themselves as “professionals”. Just as unskilled manual workers in manufacturing were the dominant social and political force in the 20th century, knowledge technologists are likely to become the dominant social—and perhaps also political—force over the next decades.

The new protectionism

Structurally, too, the next society is already diverging from the society almost all of us still live in. The 20th century saw the rapid decline of the sector that had dominated society for 10,000 years: agriculture. In volume terms, farm production now is at least four or five times what it was before the first world war. But in 1913 farm products accounted for 70% of world trade, whereas now their share is at most 17%. In the early years of the 20th century, agriculture in most developed countries was the largest single contributor to GDP; now in rich countries its contribution has dwindled to the point of becoming marginal. And the farm population is down to a tiny proportion of the total.

Manufacturing has travelled a long way down the same road. Since the second world war, manufacturing output in the developed world has probably tripled in volume, but inflation-adjusted manufacturing prices have fallen steadily, whereas the cost of prime knowledge products—health care and education—has tripled, again adjusted for inflation. The relative purchasing power of manufactured goods against knowledge products is now only one-fifth or one-sixth of what it was 50 years ago. Manufacturing employment in America has fallen from 35% of the workforce in the 1950s to less than half that now, without causing much social disruption. But it may be too much to hope for an equally easy transition in countries such as Japan or Germany, where blue-collar manufacturing workers still make up 25-30% of the labour force.

The decline of farming as a producer of wealth and of livelihoods has allowed farm protectionism to spread to a degree that would have been unthinkable before the second world war. In the same way, the decline of manufacturing will trigger an explosion of manufacturing protectionism—even as lip service continues to be paid to free trade. This protectionism may not necessarily take the form of traditional tariffs, but of subsidies, quotas and regulations of all kinds. Even more likely, regional blocks will emerge that trade freely internally but are highly protectionist externally. The European Union, NAFTA and Mercosur already point in that direction.

The future of the corporation

Statistically, multinational companies play much the same part in the world economy as they did in 1913. But they have become very different animals. Multinationals in 1913 were domestic firms with subsidiaries abroad, each of them self-contained, in charge of a politically defined territory, and highly autonomous. Multinationals now tend to be organised globally along product or service lines. But like the multinationals of 1913, they are held together and controlled by ownership. By contrast, the multinationals of 2025 are likely to be held together and controlled by strategy. There will still be ownership, of course. But alliances, joint ventures, minority stakes, know-how agreements and contracts will increasingly be the building blocks of a confederation. This kind of organisation will need a new kind of top management.

In most countries, and even in a good many large and complex companies, top management is still seen as an extension of operating management. Tomorrow's top management, however, is likely to be a distinct and separate organ: it will stand for the company. One of the most important jobs ahead for the top management of the big company of tomorrow, and especially of the multinational, will be to balance the conflicting demands on business being made by the need for both short-term and long-term results, and by the corporation's various constituencies: customers, shareholders (especially institutional investors and pension funds), knowledge employees and communities. Against that background, this survey will seek to answer two questions: what can and should managements do now to be ready for the next society? And what other big changes may lie ahead of which we are as yet unaware?

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德鲁克百年 | The Manufacturing Paradox

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:11:18 +0800

The Economist
The Manufacturing Paradox

How do you get far more output with far fewer workers?

By Peter F. Drucker

November 1, 2001

In the closing years of the 20th century, the world price of the steel industry's biggest single product—hot rolled coil, the steel for car bodies—plunged from 0 to 0 a ton. Yet these were boom years in America and prosperous times in most of continental Europe, with automobile production setting records. The steel industry's experience is typical of manufacturing as a whole. Between 1960 and 1999, both manufacturing's share in America's GDP and its share of total employment roughly halved, to around the 15% mark. Yet in the same 40 years manufacturing's physical output doubled or tripled. In 1960, manufacturing was the centre of the American economy, and of the economies of all other developed countries. By 2000, as a contributor to GDP it was easily outranked by the financial sector.

The relative purchasing power of manufactured goods (what economists call the terms of trade) has fallen by three-quarters in the past 40 years. Whereas manufacturing prices, adjusted for inflation, are down by 40%, the prices of the two main knowledge products, health care and education, have risen about three times as fast as inflation. In 2000, therefore, it took five times as many units of manufactured goods to buy the main knowledge products as it had done 40 years earlier.

The purchasing power of workers in manufacturing has also gone down, although by much less than that of their products. Their productivity has risen so sharply that most of their real income has been preserved. Forty years ago, labour costs in manufacturing typically accounted for around 30% of total manufacturing costs; now they are generally down to 12-15%. Even in the car industry, still the most labour-intensive of the engineering branches, labour costs in the most advanced plants are no higher than 20%. Manufacturing workers, especially in America, have ceased to be the backbone of the consumer market. At the height of the crisis in America's “rust belt”, when employment in the big manufacturing centres was ruthlessly slashed, national sales of consumer goods barely budged.

What has changed manufacturing, and sharply pushed up productivity, are new concepts. Information and automation are less important than new theories of manufacturing, which are an advance comparable to the arrival of mass production 80 years ago. Indeed, some of these theories, such as Toyota's “lean manufacturing”, do away with robots, computers and automation. One highly publicised example involved replacing one of Toyota's automated and computerised paint-drying lines by half a dozen hairdryers bought in a supermarket.

Manufacturing is following exactly the same path that farming trod earlier. Beginning in 1920, and accelerating after the second world war, farm production shot up in all developed countries. Before the first world war, many Western European countries had to import farm products. Now there is only one net farm importer left: Japan. Every single European country now has large and increasingly unsaleable farm surpluses. In quantitative terms, farm production in most developed countries today is probably at least four times what it was in 1920 and three times what it was in 1950 (except in Japan). But whereas at the beginning of the 20th century farmers made up the largest single group in the working population in most developed countries, now they account for no more than 3% in any developed country. And whereas at the beginning of the 20th century agriculture was the largest single contributor to national income in most developed countries, in 2000 in America it contributed less than 2% to GDP.

Manufacturing is unlikely to expand its output in volume terms as much as agriculture did, or to shrink as much as a producer of wealth and of jobs. But the most believable forecast for 2020 suggests that manufacturing output in the developed countries will at least double, while manufacturing employment will shrink to 10-12% of the total workforce.

In America, the transition has largely been accomplished already, and with a minimum of dislocation. The only hard-hit group have been African Americans, to whom the growth in manufacturing jobs after the second world war offered quick economic advancement, and whose jobs have now largely gone. But by and large, even in places that relied heavily on a few large manufacturing plants, unemployment remained high only for a short time. Even the political impact in America has been minimal.

But will other industrial countries have an equally easy passage? In Britain, manufacturing employment has already fallen quite sharply without causing any unrest, although it seems to have produced social and psychological problems. But what will happen in countries such as Germany or France, where labour markets remain rigid and where, until very recently, there has been little upward mobility through education? These countries already have substantial and seemingly intractable unemployment, eg, in Germany's Ruhr and in France's old industrial area around Lille. They may face a painful transition period with severe social upheavals.

The biggest question mark is over Japan. To be sure, it has no working-class culture, and it has long appreciated the value of education as an instrument of upward mobility. But Japan's social stability is based on employment security, especially for blue-collar workers in big manufacturing industry, and that is eroding fast. Yet before employment security was introduced for blue-collar workers in the 1950s, Japan had been a country of extreme labour turbulence. Manufacturing's share of total employment is still higher than in almost any other developed country—around a quarter of the total—and Japan has practically no labour market and little labour mobility.

Psychologically, too, the country is least prepared for the decline in manufacturing. After all, it owed its rise to great-economic-power status in the second half of the 20th century to becoming the world's manufacturing virtuoso. One should never underrate the Japanese. Throughout their history they have shown unparalleled ability to face up to reality and to change practically overnight. But the decline in manufacturing as the key to economic success confronts Japan with one of the biggest challenges ever.

The decline of manufacturing as a producer of wealth and jobs changes the world's economic, social and political landscape. It makes “economic miracles” increasingly difficult for developing countries to achieve. The economic miracles of the second half of the 20th century—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore—were based on exports to the world's rich countries of manufactured goods that were produced with developed-country technology and productivity but with emerging-country labour costs. This will no longer work. One way to generate economic development may be to integrate the economy of an emerging country into a developed region—which is what Vicente Fox, the new Mexican president, envisages with his proposal for total integration of “North America”, ie, the United States, Canada and Mexico. Economically this makes a lot of sense, but politically it is almost unthinkable. The alternative—which is being pursued by China—is to try to achieve economic growth by building up a developing country's domestic market. India, Brazil and Mexico also have large enough populations to make home-market-based economic development feasible, at least in theory. But will smaller countries, such as Paraguay or Thailand, be allowed to export to the large markets of emerging countries such as Brazil?

The decline in manufacturing as a creator of wealth and jobs will inevitably bring about a new protectionism, once again echoing what happened earlier in agriculture. For every 1% by which agricultural prices and employment have fallen in the 20th century, agricultural subsidies and protection in every single developed country, including America, have gone up by at least 1%, often more. And the fewer farm voters there are, the more important the “farm vote” has become. As numbers have shrunk, farmers have become a unified special-interest group that carries disproportionate clout in all rich countries.

Protectionism in manufacturing is already in evidence, although it tends to take the form of subsidies instead of traditional tariffs. The new regional economic blocks, such as the European Union, NAFTA or Mercosur, do create large regional markets with lower internal barriers, but they protect them with higher barriers against producers outside the region. And non-tariff barriers of all kinds are steadily growing. In the same week in which the 40% decline in sheet-steel prices was announced in the American press, the American government banned sheet-steel imports as “dumping”. And no matter how laudable their aims, the developed countries' insistence on fair labour laws and adequate environmental rules for manufacturers in the developing world acts as a mighty barrier to imports from these countries.

Smaller numbers, bigger clout

Politically, too, manufacturing is becoming more influential the fewer manufacturing workers there are, especially in America. In last year's presidential election the labour vote was more important than it had been 40 or 50 years earlier, precisely because the number of trade-union members has become so much smaller as a percentage of the voting population. Feeling endangered, they have closed ranks. A few decades ago, a substantial minority of American union members voted Republican, but in last year's election more than 90% of union members are thought to have voted Democrat (though their candidate still lost).

For over 100 years, America's trade unions have been strong supporters of free trade, at least in their rhetoric, but in the past few years they have become staunchly protectionist and declared enemies of “globalisation”. No matter that the real threat to manufacturing jobs is not competition from abroad, but the rapid decline of manufacturing as a creator of work: it is simply incomprehensible that manufacturing production can go up while manufacturing jobs go down, and not only to trade unionists but also to politicians, journalists, economists and the public at large. Most people continue to believe that when manufacturing jobs decline, the country's manufacturing base is threatened and has to be protected. They have great difficulty in accepting that, for the first time in history, society and economy are no longer dominated by manual work, and a country can feed, house and clothe itself with only a small minority of its population engaged in such work.

The new protectionism is driven as much by nostalgia and deep-seated emotion as by economic self-interest and political power. Yet it will achieve nothing, because “protecting” ageing industries does not work. That is the clear lesson of 70 years of farm subsidies. The old crops—corn (maize), wheat, cotton—into which America has pumped countless billions since the 1930s—have all done poorly, whereas unprotected and unsubsidised new crops—such as soya beans—have flourished. The lesson is clear: policies that pay old industries to hold on to redundant people can only do harm. Whatever money is being spent should instead go on subsidising older laid-off workers, and retraining and redeploying younger ones.

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