Cloud Computing and Peter Drucker

One of the most amusing photographs I’ve ever seen of Peter Drucker shows him sitting in front of a boxy Compaq computer. He awkwardly holds a mouse in his right hand, while his left hand stretches stiffly to the keyboard. The quizzical look on his face says, “Get me out of here.”

None of this is terribly surprising for a man who was so ill at ease on a PC that, while ruminating on how the Web was changing the world at the start of the twenty-first century, he chose to write the last of his books on a Brother typewriter. As for the computer, Drucker once remarked, “I treat it just like a big adding machine.”

Beyond his personal discomfort, Drucker worried that managers have a tendency to become overly enamored of the latest gizmo. As a result, they forget that technology is not an end in itself and that for certain decisions—those requiring intuition, for example—humans will always have an advantage over machines. “All a computer can handle are abstractions,” Drucker wrote. “And abstractions can be relied on only if they are constantly checked against the concrete.”