Crossing the divide into the new realities.
Every few hundred years there occurs a sharp transformation. We cross a “divide.” Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself—its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structure, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. The people born after the transformation cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born.
But today’s fundamental changes, these new realities visible thirty years ago, are actually only beginning and just about to have their full impacts. They underlie the worldwide restructuring of businesses, large and small—mergers, divestitures, alliances. They underlie the worldwide restructuring of the workforce—which, while largely an accomplished fact in the U.S., is still in its early stages in Japan and Europe. And they underlie the need for fundamental innovation in education and especially in higher education. These realities are different from the issues on which politicians, economists, scholars, businessmen, and union leaders still fix their attention, still write books, still make speeches.
ACTION POINT: Next time you hear colleagues pounding the table for something that is clearly yesterday’s news, find a way to tell them they need to wake up and smell the coffee.
The Next Realities
Post-Capitalist Society
The Age of Discontinuity
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker