4 Peter F. Drucker Quotes on Change

Peter F. Drucker quotes on change

1. ...the information revolution. Almost everybody is sure ...that it is proceeding with unprecedented speed; and ...that its effects will be more radical than anything that has gone before. Wrong, and wrong again. Both in its speed and its impact, the information revolution uncannily resembles its two predecessors ...The first industrial revolution, triggered by James Watt's improved steam engine in the mid-1770s...did not produce many social and economic changes until the invention of the railroad in 1829 ...Similarly, the invention of the computer in the mid-1940s, ...it was not until 40 years later, with the spread of the Internet in the 1990s, that the information revolution began to bring about big economic and social changes. ...the same emergence of the 'super-rich' of their day, characterized both the first and the second industrial revolutions. ...These parallels are close and striking enough to make it almost certain that, as in the earlier industrial revolutions, the main effects of the information revolution on the next society still lie ahead. -- 'The way ahead' Economist.com (November 2001)

26. All economic activity is by definition 'high risk.' And defending yesterday--that is, not innovating--is far more risky than making tomorrow. -- Innovations and Entrepreneurship (1985)

34. In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions 'against' rather than revolutions 'for'... On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to [by both] the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration. -- Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959)

37. We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad, ...We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order... We see change as being order itself--indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one. -- Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959)