Knowledge Management: The Death of Wisdom

CHAPTER 2

Getting from A to B Without Going Via Z

The urgency of the productivity challenge is great. The country that does this first will dominate the twenty-first century economically.

—Peter Drucker, management guru1

He has been portrayed as the man who invented management,2 a testimonial borne out of his sage-like predictions of many of the major developments of the century in which he lived. The description, which appeared in the trade journal Business Week in the month of his passing in 2005, when he was 95, listed how he had foretold the advent of privatization, decentralization, the rise of Japan to economic dominance, the importance of marketing, and the beginnings of what he called the information society with its requisite for lifelong ...