Managers in every organization from the largest publicly owned company to the smallest not-for-profit face the same unsettling imperative: to build change into their organization's very structure. On the one hand, this means being prepared to abandon everything that the organization does. On the other, it means constantly creating the new. Unless this process of abandonment and creation goes on without ceasing, the organization will very soon find itself obsolescent--losing performance and with it the ability to attract and hold the people on whom its performance depends. What drives this imperative is the nature of the organization itself. Every organization exists to put knowledge to work, but knowledge changes fast, with today's certainties becoming tomorrow's absurdities. That is why any knowledgeable individual must likewise acquire new knowledge every several years or also become obsolete. Familiar as the term "organization" is, we have only begun to reckon with the implications of living in a world in which the fundamental unit of society is--and must be--destabilizing. That is why questions of social responsibility now arise so often and from so many quarters. We need new ways to understand the relationship between organizations and their employees, who may in fact be unpaid volunteers, independent professionals whose organization is a network, or knowledgeable specialists who can--and often do--move on at any moment. For more than 600 years, no society has had as many competing centers of power as the one in which we now live. Drucker explains why change is--and must be--the only constant in an organization's life and explores the consequences for managers, individuals, and society overall.
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