The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society and Economy

PART III1960s

Jack Beatty, Peter Drucker’s biographer, has pointed out that, in spite of its provocative title, Drucker’s 1968 book The Age of Discontinuity “all but ignores” the most convulsive events of the day: student protests, the Civil Rights movement, and Vietnam. And yet, he added, The Age of Discontinuity is “a very 1960s book in its conviction that truth lies under the surface” and “trends under the trends.” Specifically, what Drucker set out to chronicle were big, if little noticed, changes in the “social and cultural reality” that seemed likely “to mold and shape the closing decades of the twentieth century.” Among the “new industries already in sight,” Drucker proclaimed, was one called “information systems.” “The impact of cheap, ...