Page 248 - The Drucker Lectures

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The Future of the Corporation I

2003

ust the other day I had a telephone call from an old friend in
JEurope, who was my student in New York about 45 years ago.
He called up to tell me that he had just been named CEO of one
of the major European multinationals. And then he said, “Peter
I have a question: Does the corporation have a future?” And I
said, “Yes, but it will be different.”
We could talk, for instance, about moving from control by
ownership to control by strategy. Or we could talk about moving
from the monolithic corporation, which owns everything that it
does, to a confederation based on alliances and relationships.
Everybody in this room, including myself, takes the corpora-
tion for granted. We don’t realize what a recent development it
is. How unprecedented it is.
If you want to understand how unprecedented the corpora-
tion is, have a look at all the good business novels of the period
just before it—[Charles] Dickens in the English language and
[Honoré de] Balzac in the French. It is no accident that, by con-
trast, we do not yet have a good corporation novel, not a single
one. It is too new.
What brought the corporation into being? What advantages
does it have? These questions weren’t even asked until just around
World War II. That’s when a very brilliant Englishman [Ronald
Coase], who went to the University of Chicago and won the

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