PREFACE

There should be underlying unity to a collection of essays. There should be a point of view, a central theme, an organ point around which the whole volume composes itself. And there is, I believe, such fundamental unity to this volume of essays, even though they date from more than a dozen years ago and discuss a variety of topics. One of the essays, “Work and Tools,” states: “Technology is not about tools, it deals with how Man works.” This might be the device of this entire volume, if not, indeed, for my entire work over the years.

All the essays in this volume deal with one or the other aspect of what used to be called “the material civilization”: they all deal with man’s tools and his materials, with his institutions and organizations, and with the way he works and makes his living. But throughout, work and materials, organizations and a living are seen as “extensions of man,” rather than as material artifacts and part of inanimate nature. If I were to reflect on my own position over the years, I would say that, from the very beginning, I rejected the common nineteenth-century view which divided man’s society into “culture,” dealing with ideas and symbols, and “civilization,” dealing with artifacts and things. “Civilization” to me has always been a part of man’s personality, and an area in which he expressed his basic ideals, his dreams, his aspirations, and his values. Some of the essays in this volume are about technology and its history. Some are about management and managers. Some are about specific tools—the computer, for instance. But all of them are about man at work; all are about man trying to make himself effective.

An essay collection, however, should also have diversity. It should break an author’s thought and work the way a prism breaks light. Indeed, the truly enjoyable essay collection is full of surprises as the same author, dealing with very much the same areas, is suddenly revealed in new guises and suddenly reveals new facets of his subject. The essays collected in this volume deal with only one of the major areas that have been of concern to me—the area of the “material civilization.” But there is a good deal of variety in them. Five of the twelve essays in this volume deal with technology, its history, and its impact on man and his culture. They range in time, however, from a look at the “first technological revolution,” seven thousand years ago, when the irrigation cities created what we still call “modern civilization,” to an attempt to evaluate the position of technology in our present century. They all assume that history cannot be written, let alone make sense, unless it takes technology into account and is aware of the development of man’s tools and his use of them through the ages. This, needless to say, is not a position historians traditionally have held; there are only signs so far that they are beginning to realize that technology has been with us from the earliest date and has always been an intimate and integral part of man’s experience, man’s society, and man’s history. At the same time, these essays all assume that the technologist, to use his tools constructively, has to know a good deal of history and has to see himself and his discipline in relationship to man and society—and that has been an even less popular position among technologists than the emphasis on technology has been among historians.

Four essays in this volume—the first two, the essay, “The Once and Future Manager,” and the essay on “Business Objectives and Survival Needs”—look upon the manager as the agent of today’s society and upon management as a central social function. They assume that managers handle tools, assume that managers know their tools thoroughly and are willing to acquire new ones as needed. But, above all, they ask the question, “What results do we expect from the manager; what results does his enterprise, whether a business or a government agency, need from him? What results, above all, do our society and the human beings that compose it have a right to expect from a manager and from management?” The concern is with management as it affects the quality of life—that management can provide the quantities of life is taken as proven.

The remaining three essays (“Long-range Planning,” “The Manager and the Moron,” and “Can Management Ever Be a Science?” deal with basic approaches and techniques. They are focused on management within the enterprise rather than on management as a social function. But they stress constantly the purpose of management, which is not to be efficient but to be productive, for the human being, for economy, for society.

An essay collection, finally, should convey the personality of the author better than a book can. This is why I enjoy reading essays. It should bring out a man’s style, a man’s wit, and the texture of a man’s mind. Whether this essay collection does this, I leave to the reader to judge. But I do hope that these twelve essays of mine, written for different purposes and at different times since 1957, will also help to establish the bond between author and writer, which, in the last analysis, is why a writer writes and a reader reads.

Peter F. Drucker

Montclair, New Jersey