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ness o by Peter F. Drucker ot in a very long time-not, perhaps, since the late 1940s or early 1950s-have there been as many new major management techniques as there are today: downsizing, outsourcing, total quality management, economic value analysis, benchmarking, reengineering. Each is a powerful tool.
But, with the exceptions of outsourcing and reengineering, these tools are designed primarily to do differently what is already being done. They are "how to do" tools.
Yet "what to do" is increasingly becoming the central challenge facing managements, especially those of big companies that have enjoyed long-term success. The story is a familiar one: a company that was a superstar only yesterday finds itself stagnating and frustrated, in trouble and, often, in a seemingly unmanageable crisis.
This phenomenon is by no means confined to the United States. It has become common in Japan and Germany, the Netherlands and
France, Italy and Sweden. And it occurs just as often outside business-in labor unions, government agencies, hospitals, museums, and churches. In fact, it seems even less tractable in those areas.
The root cause of nearly every one of these crises is not that things are being done poorly. It is not even that the wrong things are being done. Indeed, in most cases, the tight things are being done - but fruitlessly. What accounts for this apparent paradox?
The assumptions on which the organization has been built and is being run no longer fit reality. These are the assumptions that

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Feter F. Drucker is the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California, where the Drucker Management Center was named in his honor. This is
Drucker's thirty-first article for HBR.
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW September-October 1994

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THEORY OF THE BUSINESS

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