Moore and More

Love it or hate it, Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” has people talking about the fundamental flaws and values of our economic system. In this edition of Drucker Apps, you’ll find tools to help you understand how capitalism is often too narrow, why the system faces a backlash, why business must have a social purpose, and what a “post-capitalist” future might look like. These insights—at once timely and timeless—are based on the ideas and ideals of the late Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management.

Beyond Economic Man

“I am for the free market. Even though it doesn’t work too well, nothing else works at all. But I have serious reservations about capitalism as a system because it idolizes economics as the be-all and end-all of life. It is one-dimensional.”— Peter F. Drucker, Managing in the Next Society

• When a manager’s behavior is “morally unforgiveable.” Read more here.
• Could “social business” be the answer? Read Rick Wartzman’s BusinessWeek column here.

The roots of resentment

“Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure . . . no matter how great its benefits.”— Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management

• What is “the ultimate responsibility of management?” Read more here.
• Hear David Greenberg, an executive vice president at LRN, discuss why social responsibility is essential to a company’s sustainability.

Dollars and sense

“All social energies have to be concentrated upon the promotion of economic ends, because economic progress carries the promise of the social millennium. This is capitalism: and without this social end it has neither sense nor justification.”— Peter F. Drucker, The End of Economic Man

• Where should our energies go? Read more here.
• Listen to Joe Hough, interim president of Claremont Graduate University, discuss how we lost sight of the “social end” of capitalism.

Mind over money

“If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the ‘bourgeois’ under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource.”— Peter F. Drucker, Post-Capitalst Society

• Why knowledge is power. Read more here.

Excerpt from Post-Capitalist Society reprinted by permission of HarperCollins. Copyright ©1993 by HarperCollins: all rights reserved.