This book focuses on actions, strategies, opportunities.
It focuses on what managers can do, should do, must do.
The one certainty about the times ahead, the times in which managers will have to work and perform, is that they will be turbulent times.
And in turbulent times, the first task of management is to make sure of the institution’s capacity for survival, to make sure of its structural strength and soundness, of its capacity to survive a blow, to adapt to sudden change, and to avail itself of new opportunities.
“May you live in interesting times” says an ancient Chinese curse.
There have never been more “interesting times” than the closing years of the twentieth century.
This is what this book anticipated when I first wrote it, fifteen years ago.
But the times since have been even more interesting—and therefore even more turbulent—than anyone then could have expected.
Then the Berlin Wall was still standing and the Soviet empire looked like a solid monolith.
The European Economic Community was still political manifesto more than economic reality.
Not even a lunatic could have predicted then that Mexico would jettison its hundred and fifty years of isolationism and would decide to integrate itself into the economy of the heated and feared “Yangis” to the north.
Japan, though already an economic colossus, still had a substantial trade deficit with the U.S. and Japanese-made automobile exports barely had begun.
And while quite a few of us then foresaw the economic collapse of Spanish America’s economies after two decades of gross misgovernment and reckless foreign borrowing, no one could have possibly foreseen that long-term economic drunkards such as Argentina would suddenly sober up, let alone how incredibly fast their turnaround would be.
Surely we are still very far from any “settling down” of world polity, world economy, or technology.
Indeed, as I explained in my most recent (1993) book Post-Capitalist Society, we are at best only halfway through one of the major transformations in world history.
It is thus imperative today for managers and executives of all organizations—businesses, universities, hospitals, government agencies, labor unions—to know how to manage in turbulent times.
This book is therefore perhaps even more appropriate now than it was when it first appeared.
There is one overall “text” on which this book preaches.
It is
“Don’t be clever, be conscientious.”
Predicting the future can only get you into trouble.
The task is to manage what there is and to work to create what could and should be.
There are no miracle cures in this book, no quick fixes.
Indeed, this book asks what work must be done.
The controlling word is “must.”
Executives are not in control of the universe any more than other mortals are.
But executives are accountable for the survival of the organization in their keeping, for its ability to perform, for its results.
While we cannot foretell the future, we can identify important developments that already have happened and will have major—and predictable— future impacts.
Any attempt to manage in turbulent times must start with the most predictable of all developments: demographics.
Anyone in the workforce of a developed country by the year 2010 is already born.
And the single most important development of this century will surely not he reversed: the shift from manual work to knowledge work as the central resource of a developed economy and to knowledge workers as the central work force.
The work force that today’s and tomorrow’s executives have to manage and have to make productive is very different indeed from the work force in which today’s executives began their careers themselves twenty or twenty-five years ago.
But so is the economy.
Not only has the center of gravity shifted from mechanical industries to knowledge-based industries, but it has shifted altogether from industries that make or move things to services of all kinds.
And it has shifted from national to regional economies and to transnational economies, with money and information having become truly transnational.
As everybody knows, we are in the midst of as great a technical transformation as was the first industrial revolution two hundred years ago and the second one—the one ushering in steel, chemicals, and electricity—a hundred and fifty years ago.
To manage in turbulent times, therefore, means to face up to the new realities.
It means starting out with the question: What is the world really like? rather than with assertions and assumptions that made sense only a few years ago.
In the twenty-five years after World War II planning became fashionable.
But planning, as commonly practiced, assumes a high degree of continuity.
Planning starts out, as a rule, with the trends of yesterday and projects them into the future using a different “mix” perhaps, but with very much the same elements and the same configuration.
This is no longer going to work.
The most probable assumption in a period of turbulence is the unique event that changes the configuration—and unique events cannot, by definition, he planned.
But they can often be foreseen.
This requires strategies for tomorrow, strategies that anticipate where the greatest changes are likely to occur and what they are likely to be, strategies that enable a business—or a hospital, a school, a university—to take advantage of new realities and to convert turbulence into opportunity.
This book deals with the strategies needed to use rapid changes as opportunities, the strategies needed to convert the threat of change into opportunities for productive and profitable action, and for contribution alike to society, economy, and individual.
A time of turbulence is a dangerous time, but its greatest danger is a temptation to deny reality.
The new realities fit neither the assumptions of the left nor those of the right.
They do not mesh at all with “what everybody knows.”
They differ even more from what everybody, regardless of political persuasion, still believes reality to be.
“What is” totally differs from what both right and left believe “ought to be.”
The greatest and most dangerous turbulence today results from the collision between the delusions of the decision makers—whether in governments, top managements of businesses, or union leadership-and the realities.
But a time of turbulence is also one of great opportunity for those who can understand, accept, and exploit the new realities.
It is above all a time of opportunity for leadership.
One constant theme of this book is therefore the need for the decision maker in the individual enterprise to face up to reality and to resist the temptation of “what everybody knows,” the temptation of the certainties of yesterday, which are out to become the deleterious superstitions of tomorrow.
This book discusses the new realities.
But it is concerned with action rather than understanding, with decisions rather than analysis.
It is not a “philosophical” book, nor does it ask “Where are we going?”
It aims at being practical, a work for the decision maker in whatever field of management, public or private.
It is not a “how to” book.
Rather, it tries to tell executives what to do
