Peter Drucker never knew Slack, Zoom or Teams and yet he had already said everything, or almost everything, about many of the excesses that we see today in the world of work. He talked about clarity, responsibility, objectives that are understandable to those who carry them out. He warned against confusing activity with efficiency, volume with impact, means with ends.
In imagining this fictitious interview, my aim is not only to let a guru of the past speak, but also to take a step back from the realities of the moment and show that, as is often the case, nothing is new, everything was predictable, and that if we are where we are, it is perhaps due to a lack of courage and, above all, a lack of high standards.
Speaking of standards, this is an opportunity to talk again about the man who, long before the digitization of work, was already asking questions that we are all too quick to avoid today. What is the point of what we do? Who do we do it for? And what does it really produce?
While we overload employees with tools in the hope of artificially recreating collaboration, Drucker’s thinking should have invited us to ask ourselves the right questions. No, remote work is not the problem. The real issue is what we do, or do not, put behind the word “collaboration”.
In short :
- Remote work prolongs the rise of intellectual work that was first announced in the 1950s.
- When misused, digital tools create a disorder that masks the absence of purpose and real contribution.
- Their usefulness depends on a clear intention: precise objectives, respect for the scope of collective decisions, respect for autonomy.
- Remote work highlights the failure of management based on control rather than trust.
- The manager’s real role is to help their teams succeed, not to survive in a system they do not control.
Me: Peter Drucker, you have been observing the evolution of remote work and the proliferation of digital collaboration tools for several years. What is your view on this transformation of work?
Peter Drucker: It was inevitable. I always said that the economy would dematerialize and that intellectual work, what I called knowledge work as early as the 1950s, would become central.
1950! No one wanted to see work transformed, everyone thought that I was only thinking about a minority of favored workers who were poles apart from the problems of “real” workers.
But what I see today is not a controlled transformation: it is panic organized around the word collaboration. Platforms, messaging, digital whiteboards are being put everywhere and people think that this is the future of work. No! It is just a new form of disorder similar to what we see in a factory.
The problem, as you have noted, young man, is that in a factory the disorder is visible, not in offices (The open space is not a factory but sometimes you should look at it that was and Knowledge workers, the excluded from operational excellence?)
Me: Yet many businesses claim that these tools have helped to maintain connections, prevent isolation, and facilitate communication.
Peter Drucker (smiling): Maintaining the link does not mean creating value. Just because you have 42 Zoom meetings a week and 300 Slack messages a day doesn’t mean you’re collaborating. You’re busy, not efficient. We must stop confusing communication with contribution (Are collaboration tools really about collaboration?).
Me: So the tools are useless?
Peter Drucker: Not at all. But they must follow an intention. Now, in many organizations, there is none. We adopt tools as we would buy office furniture: without asking ourselves the question of why, how, or for whom. The result: we overload our brains, dilute our priorities, and call it transversality (Hyperconnectivity in the workplace: digital becomes a burden). Besides, my friend Goldratt has already said more or less the same thing to you (Eliyahu Goldratt’s fictional interview on infobesity and bottlenecks in knowledge work).
It’s a trick, an intellectual scam. And, in a way, it’s the victory of software vendors’ marketing over buyers’ intelligence.
I would ask what the leaders should do instead.
Peter Drucker would start by working on a concept that is dear to me: clarity. What are the objectives of each team? What decisions really need to be made collectively? Where does alignment need to happen, and where should people simply be left to work in their own way, to organize themselves (People Centric Operations: adapting work and operations to knowledge workers )? Only then can the right tools be chosen. This is organizational strategy, not IT.
Me: And what about remote work itself? Are you in favor of it?
Peter Drucker: Of course. I have always said that it is not the place that matters, but the result.
And when people tell me that people who work remotely are lonely, it makes me laugh. We are lonely because the business swallows up our social life (What the loneliness of some remote workers really tells us) and we are often even lonely in the office (Many people work remotely while being in the office)!
But we are straying from the subject…
Remote work confronts businesses with a truth: they have not learned to manage performance without supervision. They have relied on control, not trust. But control doesn’t work from a distance. That’s why so many managers want to get people back into the office: not to work better, but to monitor better. It’s a step backwards.
You could have learned from the COVID epidemic! Nature gave you a real masterclass and you obviously preferred to play truant (What COVID-19 teaches us about how organizations work and Remote work: a mirror of the organizations’ weaknesses.).
We’re blaming remote work when the reality is that we’ve turned improvisation into a managerial model.
Me: Any last words for managers?
Peter Drucker:Â Ask yourself this simple question: “Am I helping my staff to succeed, or simply to survive in a system that I do not control?”
If you can’t answer it, it’s not a remote work issue. It’s a management issue.
Visual credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
