Peter DruckerPeter Drucker is widely regarded as one of the leading authorities on management and business. At 91, he's been around long enough for his insights to flourish or fail, and, with more than 30 books to his name, most have flourished. He's frequently credited by successful business folks as the man whose ideas helped them the most, and he's often cited in publications such as Fast Company, Forbes and Business 2.0, where I found an interview with him in the October 2001 issue. The first time I read one of Drucker's books was more than 20 years ago. Back then, I was young, ignorant and Republican. Drucker's words were gospel. Nor has time diminished his perception of things economic. Regarding the Internet, for example, his timing was a bit off but his assessment was exactly right:
"In January 1999 I told all my friends to get out of equities because I expected the bubble to burst any minute." In an interview published in the Summer of 2000, he declared the speculative Internet bubble was bound to burst, but within about six years it would begin to recover as reason and prudence replace the feeding frenzy. In this more recent interview, he also explained why the Great Depression was unnecessary (President Hoover refused to approve action that would have prevented the run on banks), and why the Fed and Alan Greenspan will soon prove ineffectual:
"The Fed has control only as long as people trust that when Greenspan opens his mouth, it is meaningful. But the first time it does not work -- well, magicians get no second chance." With such insightful candor, you might be surprised to read what he had to say about exporting jobs:
"A client of mine, a major financial services company, moved 85 percent of its telephone customer service ... from the Midwest to Bangalore. ... The reason you go to India is not even the wage differential -- you can't get people in this country to do that terribly boring job." So, who were they employing to do that "terribly boring job" before they made the move? Illegal aliens? Is Drucker really so ignorant as to believe what he said, or was he lying? After Michael Moore made the CEO of Nike look like an idiot on The Awful Truth, by demonstrating Americans are willing to work at grubby, boring jobs, you might expect the leading Guru of American Management to avoid making the same mistake. Americans have been doing "terribly boring" jobs all along. Offer wages that are high enough, and people with kids to feed will beat a path to boring jobs. Throw in job security (e.g., circa pre-1970s), they'll line up down the street to apply. The difference today is that businesses are taking advantage of globalization to put the squeeze on wages by divorcing themselves from nations. Either Drucker doesn't know this, in which case he's not as smart as he has demonstrated himself to be, or he would rather say what his public wants to hear than tell the truth. Just like Bill Clinton. And we all know what he is. S.W.I.N.E.Recently, while discussing the attacks on America, my mother reminded me the men who carried out the attack were not what we would call "oppressed." Most were well off, none were poor, many, it could be said, were members of the oppressor class within their own society. "They're Al Capp's 'S.W.I.N.E.' (Students Wildly Indignant About Nearly Everything)," she said. She has a point. But, like many members of what Tom Brokaw refers to as The Greatest Generation, she overlooks that material goods do not fulfill the spirit, because her generation, consumed as they were with the fight on so many fronts simply to survive, lacked the luxury of looking beyond material survival for a meaning higher than the one handed to them by the mainstream religions. As Abraham Maslow explained it, we all have a hierarchy of needs. Basically, in ascending order, these are: Survival, Security, Love, Respect, and Self-actualization. Someone who is struggling simply to survive won't fret much over missed opportunities to write a novel or paint a masterpiece. Nor will citizens whose security is threatened (say, by terrorists) grumble a lot if their government imposes security measures which to some degree disrespect their privacy. It's a psychological imperative. Beyond survival, however, lies a vast spiritual frontier which, to paraphrase the Bard, "must be peopled." That, too, is an imperative. So much that if not done with care and diligence, will give rise to all manner of exotic spiritual wildlife. While Brokaw's "greatest generation" was so concerned with survival and security that they created the wealthiest, most powerful nation on Earth, with hindsight we can see that in the process they ignored the spiritual frontier to such an extent, relying on the orthodox and traditional religions to give old answers to new questions, that by their negligence they created, in every sense of the word, the "S.W.I.N.E." The Cold War and the war in Vietnam notwithstanding, the baby-boom generation was the first American generation whose survival, security and sense of community was sufficiently assured to not only allow, but compel us to need better answers to life's fundamental questions. Answers that go beyond the sometimes simplistic and often contradictory forms of orthodox religions to discover a more refined realization of the divine. Which brings us back to the boys who brought war to America on September 11th. Behind the oil, corporate imperialism and geopolitics (discussed in depth in the October 15th, 2001, issue of Newsweek), beyond even the cultural war between the ancient patriarchy and modern equalitarian economy (noted by Boris Johnson in the September 27th, 2001, issue of The Daily Telegraph), is the simple fact that these men, too, were among the first generation in their nations to find themselves flung by their parents' wealth into the same spiritual frontier. Where it motivated young Americans to, first, march and protest, and then to embrace with nearly fanatical zeal a cutthroat me-first selfishness that gobbles everything from mega-church religion and sense-searing, soul-numbing Raves, to special effects laden science fiction, sex so casual kids are catching HIV, and Hagen Daz by the gallon, we see it now compelling some of the wayward children of Islam to commit one of the bloodiest acts in recent history. For they have become True Believers. As Eric Hoffer explained so well in his seminal work, The True Believer, fanatics are people desperate to find meaning, which they do by losing themselves in a higher purpose. A purpose which burns with such an all-consuming fire that it becomes, as with Paul Atreides, the main character of Frank Herbert's classic, Dune, a "terrible purpose" which unleashes the fighters. And so it has. Frightening as this may be, what should concern us even more is the cost of spiritual poverty in our own land, with our own people. A matter mitigated by the constant influx of immigrants, but which we cannot put off forever. Eventually, within our life times, the Maker will rise from the sands of which we are made to question our existence and demand divine purpose in our lives. Some will offer religious orthodoxy, and for some that will suffice. But with the growing sophistication fueled by the Internet - the electronic "web of life" - will come a raging hunger for something more sophisticated than orthodox religion but with less psychobabble than New Age nonsense. When it comes, will we have provided the requisite structure for the soul, or will we also be consumed by our own True Believers?
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