Page 154 - The Drucker Lectures

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The New Priorities

1991

’m an old historian and one of the things that are mysteries to
Ihistorians is those periods every 200 or 300 years when sud-
denly the world changes. It’s like turning a kaleidoscope—the
pieces are the same, but their meaning is totally different. And
the people who survived that period usually can’t even figure out
what the world was like before it changed. That was the situa-
tion around 1500. Next door to us is the wonderful exhibition
of the World of Columbus in 1492. That was such a period of
change. We have a letter from a very distinguished man of 1525
after the Reformation who said, “I’ve been trying to explain to
my son what the world looked like when I grew up in the 1480s,
and I can’t.” And we had the same phenomenon 200 years ago.
It began with the American Revolution, and 50 years later, after
the Napoleonic Wars, I don’t think anybody could have under-
stood what the world was like when his father was born.
We are living in such a period. My guess is that we’re more
than halfway through. But only about halfway. It’s a period that
began around 1973, and it’s been moving very fast. Just to show
you how fast, I published a book [The New Realities] that I fin-
ished around September 1988. I published it in the spring of
’89. And it predicted—it didn’t predict, it just took notice of the
impending collapse of Communism and the dissolution of the
Communist empire. It came out in early ’89, two-and-a-half

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