Peter F. Drucker on Economic Threats

CHAPTER EIGHT

Learning from Foreign Management

WHAT CAN WE LEARN from American management? was the question asked all over the world only ten years ago. Now it is perhaps time to ask: What can American management learn from others in the free world, and especially from management in Western Europe and Japan? For Europe and Japan now have the managerial edge in many of the areas which we used to consider American strengths, if not American monopolies.

First, foreign managers increasingly demand responsibility from their employees, all the way down to the least skilled blue-collar worker on the factory floor. They are putting to work the tremendous ...