The Frontiers of Management. Peter F. Drucker

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ worldwide have been medium-size makers of specialty products, such as oil-drilling pipe, whether in the United States, in Sweden, or in Japan.

      In part, especially in the United States,* this is a result of a resurgence of entrepreneurship. But perhaps equally important, we have learned in the last thirty years how to manage the small and medium-size enterprise—to the point that the advantages of smaller size, for example, ease of communications and nearness to market and customer, increasingly outweigh what had been forbidding management limitations. Thus in the United States, but increasingly in the other leading manufacturing nations such as Japan and West Germany, the dynamism in the economy has shifted from the very big companies that dominated the world's industrial economy for thirty years after World War II to companies that, while much smaller, are still professionally managed and, largely, publicly financed.

      But also there are emerging two distinct kinds of “manufacturing industry”: one group that is materials-based, the industries that provided economic growth in the first three-quarters of this century; and another group that is information- and knowledge-based, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, analytical instruments, information processing such as computers, and so on. And increasingly it is in the information-based manufacturing industries in which growth has come to center.

      These two groups differ in their economic characteristics and especially in respect to their position in the international economy. The products of materials-based industries have to be exported or imported as products. They appear in the balance of trade. The products of information-based industries can be exported or imported both as products and as services.

      An old example is the printed book. For one major scientific publishing company, “foreign earnings” account for two-thirds of total revenues. Yet the company exports few books, if any; books are heavy. It sells “rights.” Similarly, the most profitable computer “export sale” may actually show up in the statistics as an “import.” It is the fee some of the world's leading banks, some of the big multinationals, and some Japanese trading companies get for processing in their home offices data sent in electronically from their branches or their customers anywhere in the world.

      In all developed countries, knowledge workers have already become the center of gravity of the labor force, even in numbers. Even in manufacturing they will outnumber blue-collar workers within fewer than ten years. And then, exporting knowledge so that it produces license income, service fees, and royalties may actually create substantially more jobs than exporting goods.

      This then requires, as official Washington has apparently already realized, far greater emphasis in trade policy on “invisible trade” and on abolishing the barriers, mostly of the non-tariff kind, to the trade in services, such as information, finance and insurance, retailing, patents, and even health care. Indeed, within twenty years the income from invisible trade might easily be larger, for major developed countries, than the income from the export of goods. Traditionally, invisible trade has been treated as a stepchild, if it received any attention at all. Increasingly, it will become central.

      Another implication of the uncoupling of manufacturing production from manufacturing employment is, however, that the choice between an industrial policy that favors industrial production and one that favors industrial employment is going to be a singularly contentious political issue for the rest of this century. Historically these have always been considered two sides of the same coin. From now on, however, the two will increasingly pull in different directions and are indeed becoming alternatives, if not incompatible.

      “Benevolent neglect”—the policy of the Reagan administration these last few years—may be the best policy one can hope for, and the only one with a chance of success. It is not an accident, perhaps, that the United States has, next to Japan, by far the lowest unemployment rate of any industrially developed country. Still, there is surely need also for systematic efforts to retrain and to replace redundant blue-collar workers—something that no one as yet knows how to do successfully.

      Finally, low labor costs are likely to become less and less of an advantage in international trade, simply because in the developed countries they are going to account for less and less of total costs. But also, the total costs of automated processes are lower than even those of traditional plants with low labor costs, mainly because automation eliminates the hidden but very high costs of “not working,” such as the costs of poor quality and of rejects, and the costs of shutting down the machinery to change from one model of a product to another.

      Examples are two automated U.S. producers of television receivers, Motorola and RCA. Both were almost driven out of the market by imports from countries with much lower labor costs. Both then automated, with the result that their American-made products successfully compete with foreign imports. Similarly, some highly automated textile mills in the Carolinas can underbid imports from countries with very low labor costs, for example, Thailand. Conversely, in producing semiconductors, some American companies have low labor costs because they do the labor-intensive work offshore, for instance, in West Africa. Yet they are the high-cost producers, with the heavily automated Japanese easily underbidding them, despite much higher labor costs.

      The cost of capital will thus become increasingly important in international competition. And it is the cost in respect to which the United States has become, in the last ten years, the highest-cost country—and Japan the lowest-cost one. A reversal of the U.S. policy of high interest rates and of high cost of equity capital should thus be a priority of American policymakers, the direct opposite of what has been U.S. policy for the past five years. But this, of course, demands that cutting the government deficit rather than high interest rates becomes our defense against inflation.

      For developed countries, and especially for the United States, the steady downgrading of labor costs as a major competitive factor could be a positive development. For the Third World, and especially for the rapidly industrializing countries—Brazil, for instance, or South Korea or Mexico—it is, however, bad news. Of the rapidly industrializing countries of the nineteenth century, one, Japan, developed herself by exporting raw materials, mainly silk and tea, at steadily rising prices. One, Germany, developed by “leapfrogging” into the “high-tech” industries of its time, mainly electricity, chemicals, and optics. The third rapidly industrializing country of the nineteenth century, the United States, did both. Both ways are blocked for the present rapidly industrializing countries: the first one because of the deterioration of the terms of trade for primary products, the second one because it requires an “infrastructure” of knowledge and education far beyond the reach of a poor country (although South Korea is reaching for it!). Competition based on lower labor costs seemed to be the way out. Is this way going to be blocked too?

      From “Real” to “Symbol” Economy

      The third major change is the emergence of the symbol economy—capital movements, exchange rates and credit flow—as the flywheel of the world economy, in the place of the real economy: the flow of goods and services—and largely independent of the latter. It is both the most visible and yet the least understood of the changes.

      World trade in goods is larger, much larger, than it has ever been before. And so is the invisible trade, the trade in services. Together, the two amount to around $2.5 to $3 trillion a year. But the London Eurodollar market, in which the world's financial institutions borrow from and lend to each other, turns over $300 billion each working day, or $75 trillion a year, that is, at least twenty-five times the volume of world trade.

      In addition, there are the (largely separate) foreign-exchange transactions in the world's main money centers, in which one currency is traded against another (for example, U.S. dollars against the Japanese yen). These run around $150 billion a day, or about $35 trillion a year: twelve times the worldwide СКАЧАТЬ