DWD20200217

David's Time With Peter F. Drucker 2020.2.17 Yet, despite their importance, the assumptions are rarely analyzed, rarely studied, rarely challenged-indeed rarely even made explicit. For a social discipline such as management the assumptions are actually a good deal more important than are the paradigms for a natural science. The paradigm-that is, the prevailing general thoery-has no impact on the nartural universe. Whether the paradigm states that the sun rotates around the earth or that, on the contrary the earth rotates around the sun has no effect on sun and earth. A natural science deals with the behavior of OBJECTS. But a social discipline such as management deals with the behavior of PEOPLE and HUMAN INSTITUTIONS. Practitioners will therefore tend to act and to behave as the discipline’s assumptions tell them to. Even more important, the reality of a natural science, the physical universe and its laws, do not change(or if they do only over eons rather than over centuries, let alone over decades). The social universe has no “natural laws” of this kind. It is thus subject to continuous change. And this means that assumptions that were valid yesterday can become invalid and, indeed, totally misleading in no time at all.——《Management Challenges for the 21st Century·Chapter1》(Peter F.Drucker,1999)