Peter F. Drucker Boxed Set (8 Books) (The Drucker Library)

CHAPTER EIGHT

From Middle Management to Knowledge Organization

IN THE EARLY FIFTIES when computer and automation were the headline makers, the imminent demise of middle management was widely predicted. By 1980, we were told by a number of experts, middle management would have disappeared. All decisions would be made by the computer or by top management on the basis of a “total information system.”

Very few predictions have been disproven so fast and so completely. At the very time the predictions were being widely publicized, the middle-management boom began. And it kept going for twenty years. Indeed, the fifties and the sixties might have been ...