“You can go from the International Federation of Robotics on one side, which argues that we are on the cusp of the biggest job renaissance in history, to Moshe Vardi, a Rice computer scientist, who argues that all human jobs will be obsolete by 2045,” Markoff observed. “Which group is right?”

If Peter Drucker were around, I don’t think he’d hesitate to serve up an answer: Neither.

Drucker, who had watched this struggle play out many times over many years, believed that the inexorable march of machines was neither a panacea nor a complete catastrophe. And he was wary of any analysis that tipped too far in one direction.

“The technology impacts which the experts predict almost never occur,” Drucker wrote in his 1973 classic Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.

Indeed, Drucker viewed automation as a decidedly mixed bag—a lift for those fortunate souls with the knowledge and skills to take advantage of the shifting landscape of work and a huge challenge for many others invariably left behind.

One of Drucker’s first looks at this double-edged dynamic came in 1946, when he visited the Mississippi Delta and witnessed the mechanical cotton picker replacing laborers in the field—for better as well as for worse.

“It is easy—and very popular in the Deep South today—to see only one aspect of the technological revolution through which the Cotton Belt is passing: the removal of the dead hand of the cotton economy and plantation society, the establishment of a sound agriculture and of a better balance between industry and farming, higher incomes, better living standards, the end of sharecropping—in short the final emancipation of both white and colored from slavery,” Drucker reported in Harper’s magazine. “It is also easy to see only the other aspect: dislocation, the suffering, the uprooting of millions of people who will lose their homes and their livelihood.

“However,” Drucker added, “the full picture, as in all technological revolutions, emerges only if both—the better life for those who can adjust themselves and the suffering of those who are pushed out—are seen together and at the same time.”

Over the decades, as agriculture gave way to manufacturing and much of manufacturing was supplanted by knowledge work, Drucker worried ever more about those who were being “pushed out.” He feared that they would lose not only their income, but also the basic sense of dignity and fulfillment that comes from putting in a solid day’s work.

The “shrinkage of jobs in the smokestack industries and their conversion to being capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive, that is, to automation, will put severe strains—economic, social, political—on the system,” Drucker warned in his 1986 book The Frontiers of Management.

From his earliest writings to his last, Drucker offered the same prescription to deal with such hardship: the creation of meaningful opportunities for lifelong learning. After all, he wrote in 1955, “if there is one thing certain under automation, it is that the job . . . will change radically and often.”

Of particular note now—in an age where artificial intelligence threatens to upend the careers of even the most well-educated white-collar workers—Drucker didn’t preach the importance of lifelong learning for any one type of occupation. Everyone, he thought, must continually be prepared to take in and master new ways to approach their job.

“This will be true in all areas of the organization: rank and file, office work, technical and professional work, managerial work,” Drucker asserted. “On every level, adult education . . . will be needed.”

Making this happen was, in Drucker’s eyes, a joint responsibility. The public sector has its part—to make sure that “schools and employing institutions . . . work together in the advanced education of adults.”

“School,” Drucker wrote in 1993’s Post-Capitalist Society, “has traditionally been where you learn; job has been where you work. The line will become increasingly blurred.”

Employers also have their role, including “active and energetic attempts at retraining for specific new job opportunities,” as Drucker put it. And each employee must step up and be ready to embrace what’s being taught—over and over and over again. “People have to learn how to learn,” Drucker advised. “No one is allowed to consider himself or herself ‘finished’ at any time.”

These concepts are not, in and of themselves, earth-shattering. But they are extremely difficult to execute, for they require from all parties—educators, executives and individual employees—attributes that are distinctly human: vision, heart and courage. As Drucker knew all too well, none of that comes with the simple press of a button.

About the author:

Rick Wartzman is the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University and a columnist for Fortune magazine online.

I had come to Vienna to participate in the Fourth Global Peter Drucker Forum, which attracted hundreds of executives, scholars and students to contemplate what, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and Great Recession, a better form of capitalism might look like. Much of the discussion on “Capitalism 2.0” centered, sensibly, on finding alternatives to maximizing shareholder value.

But other important threads also ran through the proceedings, including the way that information technology is reshaping all sorts of organizations. It was this particular theme that prompted me to flash on-and laugh about-a brief missive that Drucker sent to a friend in April 2005. “Pardon my ignorance,” he wrote, “but how do you get people to look at the Internet?”

The funny part is, as unfamiliar as the then-95-year-old was with exactly how folks maneuvered online, he had spent much of his life exploring and explaining a world that was becoming increasingly dominated by an unending stream of data and knowledge. “The impact of cheap, reliable, fast and universally available information will easily be as great as was the impact of electricity,” Drucker declared in his 1968 book The Age of Discontinuity.

Drucker may have been behind in grasping some of the details of technology, but he was incredibly far ahead in discerning the broader contours that most executives are just beginning to see, as evidenced by three insights from the forum:

1. Most companies are still stuck in a pre-knowledge-era mindset.

“When economists talk of ‘capital’ they rarely include ‘knowledge,’” Drucker wrote in his path-breaking 1959 book Landmarks of Tomorrow. “Yet this is the only real capital today.” As consultant and author Tammy Erickson made clear at the event, most organizations are, more than five decades later, still coming to terms with this reality.

“We are moving out of a century in which the key resource that distinguished one’s business was capital-‘those who had money made money,’” Erickson told the audience. “Today we live in a world in which the biggest challenge facing any company and every business leader is to mobilize intelligence.” That, she explained, is the way to offer the customized products and services that consumers now demand; respond quickly to outside changes “through insights gained from faint signals”; innovate; and “harness the smallest units of knowledge, creating value from bits that in the past would have been ignored or discarded.”

2. Getting information to flow seamlessly between parts of the organization, as well as between its walls and the outside universe, remains daunting.

“How do you prepare leaders to cooperate and coordinate across complex boundaries?” London Business School’s Lynda Gratton asked at the close of her presentation. She noted that while some companies, such as IBM and Infosys, have designed sophisticated platforms to enhance the ability of their people to collaborate easily and often, this continues to be a weak spot for many. In fact, the ability to transcend organizational boundaries is one of four risks (along with the successful application of open innovation, the effective use of social media and intergenerational cohesion) that Gratton’s research has shown corporate leaders are most concerned about these days.

Drucker worried about this, too. He called for executives to bring “the meaningful outside” into their organizations. Internally, meanwhile, “all the managers in a plant will have to know and understand the entire process, just as the destroyer commander had to know and understand the tactical command of the entire flotilla,” Drucker wrote in Managing for the Future, published in 1992. They will “have to think and act as team members, mindful of the performance of the whole. Above all, they will have to ask: ‘What do the people running the other modules need to know about the characteristics, the capacity, the plans and the performance of my unit? And what, in turn, do we in my module need to know about theirs?’”

3. Don’t underestimate what can be done when people have vital information in their hands.

“Whoever has the information has the power,” Drucker wrote in his 2002 book Managing in the Next Society. “Power is thus shifting to the customer.”

In the U.S., at least, Best Buy has become the poster child for this dramatic transformation. But to really comprehend how far-reaching its effects can be, we should all be looking toward China, where 530 million people are now connected to the Internet and half of those use social media every day.

John Quelch, of the China Europe International Business School, told Drucker forum attendees how one blogger last year put a dent in Siemens’s reputation after the company failed to respond adequately to complaints about refrigerators with a faulty door. The blogger, Luo Yonghao, and friends sledgehammered several of the products in front of the company’s offices in Beijing-all of it caught on video. Their efforts went viral, and Siemens wound up apologizing. At the same time, other Chinese have self-organized online to form purchasing groups with enough leverage to force down the price of, say, the new Toyota Yaris they each want to buy.

“In the absence of strong legal and consumer protection systems, social media protect the interests of ordinary people, facilitate competitive pricing through e-commerce and enable emerging as well as established brands to thrive,” Quelch remarked.

Whether this consumer power can stretch into citizen power is an open question. Drucker, though, wouldn’t have been surprised if it does. E-commerce is “profoundly changing economies, markets and industry structures,” he wrote in The Atlantic in 1999. “But the impact may be even greater on societies and politics and . . . on the way we see the world and ourselves in it.”

For hundreds of millions of Chinese, the information revolution may truly live up to its name.

AUTHOR:
Rick Wartzman is the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University and a columnist for Forbes.com. He is the author of What Would Drucker Do Now? (which is a collection of his columns) and two books of narrative history: Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and (with Mark Arax) The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American History.

This post was first published on www.forbes.com.

Next April, a group called Conscious Capitalism expects to draw some 1,500 people to San Francisco to explore how companies can “adopt a higher purpose that transcends profit maximization.”

And in between, hundreds will convene in Vienna on November 15 and 16 for the fourth Global Peter Drucker Forum, which will examine how business can become, as Unilever Chief Executive Paul Polman (one of the forum speakers) puts it, “a force for good.”

As I’ve watched these events come together-and heard similar notions about rethinking capitalism from David Cooperrider (Business as an Agent of World Benefit), Michael Porter (Shared Value), Dov Seidman (HOW) and others-I’ve felt buoyed by each of their visions.

And I’m sure that Peter Drucker would have felt good about them, too. He believed, after all, that the best corporations “define an organizational purpose that goes beyond next-quarter financial results and goes beyond maximization of shareholder wealth.”

Still, deep down, I have to admit that I’m struggling to understand the import of it all: Does this flurry of activity add up to more than a bunch of scattered conferences and white papers? Are we actually witnessing the beginnings of a social movement?

On one level, it is tempting to say yes. Indeed, it seems only natural that there would be a vigorous backlash to the myopic, financially focused mindset that triggered the financial crisis and Great Recession.

But there’s another part of me that remains skeptical. How can this disparate array of conferences and articles coalesce into a single force? If this is a genuine movement, where is it’s center? What will spur coordinated, collective action-what de Tocqueville called the “knowledge of how to combine”?

“The unique event of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring . . . changed the attitude of a whole civilization toward the environment,” Drucker noted in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. Where’s our Silent Spring for fixing capitalism?

Social movements build in stages, and it is possible, of course, that we are early in the evolution of-what does one even call it?-the Purpose-Over-Profits Movement.

Yet it is also possible that what so many of us feel passionate about won’t amount to much in the end, that all of our teeth-gnashing over short-term-itis and corporate irresponsibility will prove ineffective, much like the protests against globalization that took place in the late 1990s. “So far, these protests have no focus,” Drucker remarked in Managing in the Next Society. “They are protests against ‘the system,’ whatever that means.”

We should have no illusions that “maximizing shareholder value” itself became a movement-a key part of “the most successful intellectual movement” in law and economics circles in the past 30 years, in the words of Johns Hopkins University’s Steven Teles.

Countering it will take a movement of our own. How-and even if-we successfully nurture one remains to be seen.

AUTHOR:
Rick Wartzman is the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University and a columnist for Forbes.com. He is the author of What Would Drucker Do Now? (which is a collection of his columns) and two books of narrative history: Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and (with Mark Arax) The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American History.