Peter F. Drucker Fast Track Recording, The New Realities

Fast Track recording for Peter F. Drucker’s book, The New Realities. Bill Corsair introduces Peter F. Drucker and provides information on the book before discussing its premise. Corsair then welcomes the narrator, who proceeds to summarize Drucker’s book. The narrator begins by discussing the most important of the new realities--the evolution of the knowledge worker and shift to organization emphasis on the knowledge worker, which represents a sharp break with the past. Despite capitalism and business thriving in the post-World War II world, it is the knowledge worker who now has the power in corporate society. Knowledge workers are specialists, and operate in fields that can be quite narrow. However, they often know more than the boss, and are more like colleagues than subordinates in most organizations. Workers with transferable skills now know, in the modern era, that they are not dependent on one employer to sustain themselves. What matters most to knowledge workers is that the companies’ equipment is state-of-the-art, and the work assignment is challenging. Business values appear to interfere with the performance of knowledge workers. As knowledge becomes the premier wealth-producing resource, the demands for educational performance grow. The surge in education has also triggered a surge in entrepreneurship, which will increasingly result in technological and social innovations. The rise of the information-based organization is a result of the increase in knowledge workers. Information is raw data endowed with relevance and purpose, and converting such data into information requires knowledge. The switch to information-based production marks the end of the union era of corporate and social advancement, as advancement now requires knowledge. The abundance of knowledge work requires that non-knowledge jobs become as productive and self-respecting as possible. Through advancements in technology, the capital investment decision is now a business decision based on the probability of alternative strategic ...