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Out of Box Thinking on Drucker Featured in Forbes
Contact: Yogesh Malhotra, Principal & Founder
E-mail: host@brint.com
WWW: http://www.brint.com/host.html
Pittsburgh, PA, April 7, 1997 -- Our Out-of-box Thinking column covers critique and analysis of the latest news stories on business and technology making headlines in the top-notch magazines and trade journals.Recent Forbes cover story on Peter Drucker stimulated the thinking of your host. The writers of that story seemed to have incorrectly interpreted Drucker as suggesting that the dependence of the U.S. managers on computers have done a lot of harm to business. We believe that Drucker's criticism was directed toward the insular or inwardly focused view of managers who primarily rely upon crunching internal company information without much heed to the external reality of business. Drucker had noted in his interview that, desirably, managers should try to familiarize themselves with the reality buried underneath the edifice of numbers stored in computer database memories.
In the same interview, Drucker had also speculated about the forthcoming obsolescence of universities and the academics, at least as they are viewed in the traditional sense. Although, it was not made explicit, we believe that the notion of misalignment between the theory of business and external reality is pertinent to both contexts. In case of the former, we are referring to this misalignment prevalent in the corporate sector. In the latter, we are referring to the misalignment between the needs of the stakeholders and the services rendered by the business of academia.
These issues are discussed in our analysis titled Have Computers Done a Lot of Harm? How About the Business Academia?. A letter based on this critique was sent to the editor of Forbes. The unedited version of the letter is reproduced below. The much abridged online version of the letter published in Forbes is also accessible. The much abridged version of the following letter sent to Forbes was published in their April 7, 1997 issue.
Have Computers Done US Managers a Lot of Harm?
Dear Forbes Editor,
Your cover story 'Peter Drucker - Still the Youngest of Minds' (March 10) raises some thought-provoking issues. Particularly, it seems to incorrectly emphasize Drucker's thinking about the harm caused to US businesses and managers because of their dependence on computers. Based on long-term familiarity with Drucker's thinking on information and technology as chronicled in his books and articles, I tend to believe that your cover story did not correctly communicate Drucker's emphasis on this issue. Specifically, what Drucker criticizes is not computers per se, but the dependence of the US managers on the 'inward focus' based on the company's internal information. In that context, he exhorts the business managers to be keenly aware of the 'external reality' and align the 'theory of the business' with the changing reality of business (Harvard Business Review, Sep-Oct 1994). His criticism about confusing 'information' with 'information technology' may be perhaps better stated in his own words: "it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information." [Drucker, P.F. (1995). "The Post-Capitalist Executive," in Managing in a Time of Great Change, Penguin, New York, NY.]
Sincerely,
Yogesh Malhotra
host@brint.com