The daily drucker, p.1
The Daily Drucker, page 1
The Daily Drucker
366 Days of Insight and Motivation
for Getting the Right Things Done
Peter F. Drucker
with Joseph A. Maciariello
“KNOW THY TIME.”
Peter F. Drucker
Contents
Preface
Introduction
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Annotated Bibliography
Sources by Book or Internet Module
Sources by Day and Parallel Passages
Readings by Topic
About the Authors
Credits
Books by Peter F. Drucker & Joseph A. Maciarello
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
“Which of Peter Drucker’s books should I read?” “Where in your work do I find the best discussion on how to place people?” Not a week goes by without my receiving half a dozen questions like these. With thirty-four books published over sixty-five years, even I find it difficult to answer these questions.
The Daily Drucker is intended to provide an answer. It presents in organized form—and directly from my own writings—a key statement of mine, followed by a few lines, also from my own works, of comment and explanation, on topics ranging across a great many fields of my work: management, business, and the world economy; a changing society; innovation and entrepreneurship; decision making; the changing workforce; the nonprofits and their management; and so on.
But the most important part of this book is the blank spaces at the bottom of its pages. They are what the readers will contribute, their actions, decisions and the results of these decisions. For this is an action book.
This book owes everything to my longtime friend and colleague, Professor Joseph A. Maciariello. It was his idea to bring together in one volume the best excerpts from my writings. He then selected both the appropriate quotes and the commentaries on them from my books, scripts, and articles. The result is a truly comprehensive guide to executive effectiveness. My readers and I owe a very great debt of gratitude to Professor Maciariello.
PETER F. DRUCKER
Claremont, California
Summer 2004
Introduction
In putting together The Daily Drucker, I have tried to distill and synthesize the “tapestry” that Peter Drucker has woven and continues to weave. I have done this by constructing 366 readings, each addressing a major topic, one for every day of the year, including February 29. Each reading starts with a topic and a “Drucker Proverb” or other quote capturing the essence of the topic. These proverbs, wise sayings, and quotes are mnemonic constructs that remind one of the teaching on each topic. Then follows a teaching taken directly from the works of Peter Drucker. Next comes the action step, where you are asked to “act on” the teaching and apply it to yourself and your organization.
After each reading, the original source or sources from which the reading was excerpted are cited as references. Unless indicated otherwise, the page references provided in “Sources by Day” refer to the latest edition of each book. The status of each reference is contained in the “Annotated Bibliography,” at the end of the book. Most Drucker books referenced are in print, especially those referred to most often. If you wish to go deeper into a specific topic, you may.
One word of advice: Look for “the future that has already happened.” If you can identify and act upon trends that are just now emerging, you will carry forward in practice the Drucker Tradition.
I have many times listened to Peter Drucker address executives, and I have on a few occasions seen him in action as a consultant. In his teaching and consulting he has impressed me most by the consistency and effectiveness of the approach he uses. First, he always makes sure he has defined the problem correctly. Next, he seems to weave a tapestry, bringing his vast knowledge to bear upon the specific problem, and putting in “stitches,” or specific portions of the solution to the problem. Finally, once the problem has been circumscribed and the tapestry woven, he outlines the specific actions that should be taken to solve the problem. He then tells his audiences, “Don’t tell me you enjoyed this; tell me what you will do differently on Monday morning.”
While his approach is consistent, any single Drucker book or article is different. By the time Peter Drucker has worked through the many drafts, out comes a systematic and insightful discussion of a major topic “in society” or “in management.” But, if one studies his many writings completed over the past sixty-five years, the same tapestry that I refer to as “The Tapestry of Drucker on Society and Management” is seen.
Since graduating from college in 1962, I have been studying and using Drucker’s work. Even so, distilling and synthesizing Drucker’s work and giving thought to appropriate Action Points for each reading has been a transformative experience for me. It is my wish that the book also will be transformative for you.
I am profoundly grateful to Peter Drucker for offering me an opportunity of a lifetime and for his advice and friendship over the years. Stephen Hanselman and Leah Spiro of HarperCollins have helped to turn this opportunity into a reality. Steve had the idea for The Daily Drucker. Leah Spiro provided detailed advice and support in writing the book. I am especially grateful for the help Leah provided in reviewing each reading and helping to draft the Action Points. Ceci Hunt copyedited the manuscript. I am grateful both for her skill and hard work. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Diane Aronson, copy chief, and to Knox Huston of HarperCollins for their help in preparing this book.
In addition to the help provided by HarperCollins, I am grateful to Dean de Kluyver of the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management and to Claremont Graduate University for the sabbatical leave that allowed me to concentrate my time exclusively on this project for most of the year. Antonina Antonova served as my research assistant and Bernadette Lambeth as my assistant during this period. Diane Wallace, of the Peter F. Drucker Archive, assisted me in preparing the Annotated Bibliography. I am grateful to Antonina, Bernadette, and Diane for their help.
Finally, my wife, Judy, relieved me of all other responsibilities during this time and assisted me at every turn. It is hard to imagine a more loving wife.
JOSEPH A. MACIARIELLO
Claremont, California
Summer 2004
January
1 Integrity in Leadership
2 Identifying the Future
3 Management Is Indispensable
4 Organizational Inertia
5 Abandonment
6 Practice of Abandonment
7 Knowledge Workers: Asset Not Cost
8 Autonomy in Knowledge Work
9 The New Corporation’s Persona
10 Management as the Alternative to Tyranny
11 Management and Theology
12 Practice Comes First
13 Management and the Liberal Arts
14 The Managerial Attitude
15 The Spirit of an Organization
16 The Function of Management Is to Produce Results
17 Management: The Central Social Function
18 Society of Performing Organizations
19 The Purpose of Society
20 Nature of Man and Society
21 Profit’s Function
22 Economics as a Social Dimension
23 Private Virtue and the Commonweal
24 Feedback: Key to Continuous Learning
25 Reinvent Yourself
26 A Social Ecologist
27 The Discipline of Management
28 Controlled Experiment in Mismanagement
29 Performance: The Test of Management
30 Terrorism and Basic Trends
31 A Functioning Society
1 January
Integrity in Leadership
The spirit of an organization is created from the top.
The proof of the sincerity and seriousness of a management is uncompromising emphasis on integrity of character. This, above all, has to be symbolized in management’s “people” decisions. For it is character through which leadership is exercised; it is character that sets the example and is imitated. Character is not something one can fool people about. The people with whom a person works, and especially subordinates, know in a few weeks whether he or she has integrity or not. They may forgive a person for a great deal: incompetence, ignorance, insecurity, or bad manners. But they will not forgive a lack of integrity in that person. Nor will they forgive higher management for choosing him.
This is particularly true of the people at the head of an enterprise. For the spirit of an organization is created from the top. If an organization is great in spirit, it is because the spirit of its top people is great. If it decays, it does so because the top rots; as the proverb has it, “Trees die from the top.” No one should ever be appointed to a senior position unless top management is willing to have his or her character serve as the model for subordinates.
ACTION POINT: Evaluate the character of the CEO and top management when considering a job offer. Align yourself with people who have integrity.
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
2 January
Identifying the Future
The important thing is to identify the “future that has alre ady happened.”
Futurists always measure their batting average by counting how many things they have predicted that have come true. They never count how many important things come true that they did not predict. Everything a forecaster predicts may come to pass. Yet, he may not have seen the most meaningful of the emergent realities or, worse still, may not have paid attention to them. There is no way to avoid this irrelevancy in forecasting, for the important and distinctive are always the result of changes in values, perception, and goals, that is, in things that one can divine but not forecast.
But the most important work of the executive is to identify the changes that have already happened. The important challenge in society, economics, politics, is to exploit the changes that have already occurred and to use them as opportunities. The important thing is to identify the “future that has already happened”—and to develop a methodology for perceiving and analyzing these changes. A good deal of this methodology is incorporated in my 1985 book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which shows how one systematically looks to the changes in society, in demographics, in meaning, in science and technology, as opportunities to make the future.
ACTION POINT: Identify the major trends in your market that have already appeared. Write a page on their likely longevity and impact on your life and organization.
The Ecological Vision
The Age of Discontinuity
3 January
Management Is Indispensable
Whoever makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before deserves better of mankind than any speculative philosopher or metaphysical system builder.
Management will remain a basic and dominant institution perhaps as long as Western civilization itself survives. For management is not only grounded in the nature of the modern industrial system and in the needs of modern business enterprise, to which an industrial system must entrust its productive resources, both human and material. Management also expresses the basic beliefs of modern Western society. It expresses the belief in the possibility of controlling man’s livelihood through the systematic organization of economic resources. It expresses the belief that economic change can be made into the most powerful engine for human betterment and social justice—that, as Jonathan Swift first overstated it three hundred years ago, whoever makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before deserves better of mankind than any speculative philosopher or metaphysical system builder.
Management—which is the organ of society specifically charged with making resources productive, that is, with the responsibility for organized economic advance—therefore reflects the basic spirit of the modern age. It is, in fact, indispensable, and this explains why, once begotten, it grew so fast and with so little opposition.
ACTION POINT: Come up with a few examples of why management, its competence, its integrity, and its performance, is so decisive to the free world.
The Practice of Management
4 January
Organizational Inertia
All organizations need a discipline that makes them face up to reality.
All organizations need to know that virtually no program or activity will perform effectively for a long time without modification and redesign. Eventually every activity becomes obsolete. Among organizations that ignore this fact, the worst offender is government. Indeed, the inability to stop doing anything is the central disease of government and a major reason why government today is sick. Hospitals and universities are only a little better than government in getting rid of yesterday.
Businessmen are just as sentimental about yesterday as bureaucrats. They are just as likely to respond to the failure of a product or program by doubling the efforts invested in it. But they are, fortunately, unable to indulge freely in their predilections. They stand under an objective discipline, the discipline of the market. They have an objective outside measurement, profitability. And so they are forced to slough off the unsuccessful and unproductive sooner or later. In other organizations—government, hospitals, the military, and so on—economics is only a restraint.
All organizations must be capable of change. We need concepts and measurements that give to other kinds of organizations what the market test and profitability yardstick give to business. Those tests and yardsticks will be quite different.
ACTION POINT: Make sure your nonprofit organization has rigorous tests and yardsticks to measure performance.
The Age of Discontinuity
5 January
Abandonment
There is nothing as difficult and as expensive, but also nothing as futile, as trying to keep a corpse from stinking.
Effective executives know that they have to get many things done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate. And the first rule for the concentration of executive efforts is to slough off the past that has ceased to be productive. The first-class resources, especially those scarce resources of human strength, are immediately pulled out and put to work on the opportunities of tomorrow. If leaders are unable to slough off yesterday, to abandon yesterday, they simply will not be able to create tomorrow.
Without systematic and purposeful abandonment, an organization will be overtaken by events. It will squander its best resources on things it should never have been doing or should no longer do. As a result, it will lack the resources, especially capable people, needed to exploit the opportunities that arise. Far too few businesses are willing to slough off yesterday, and as a result, far too few have resources available for tomorrow.
ACTION POINT: Stop squandering resources on obsolete businesses and free up your capable people to take advantage of new opportunities.
The Effective Executive
Managing in Turbulent Times
Managing in a Time of Great Change
Management Challenges for the 21st Century
6 January
Practice of Abandonment
If we did not do this already, would we go into it now?
The question has to be asked—and asked seriously—“If we did not do this already, would we, knowing what we know, go into it now?” If the answer is no, the reaction must be “What do we do now?”
In three cases the right action is always outright abandonment. Abandonment is the right action if a product, service, market, or process “still has a few years of life.” It is these dying products, services, or processes that always demand the greatest care and the greatest efforts. They tie down the most productive and ablest people. But equally, a product, service, market, or process should be abandoned if the only argument for keeping it is “It is fully written off.” For management purposes there are no “cost-less assets.” There are only “sunk costs.” The third case where abandonment is the right policy—and the most important one—is the one where, for the sake of maintaining the old or declining product, service, market, or process the new and growing product, service, or process is being stunted or neglected.
ACTION POINT: Ask the questions posed above and if the answer is no, make the tough choice to abandon a cherished business.
Management Challenges for the 21st Century
7 January
Knowledge Workers: Asset Not Cost
Management’s duty is to preserve the assets of the institution in its care.
Knowledge workers own the means of production. It is the knowledge between their ears. And it is a totally portable and enormous capital asset. Because knowledge workers own their means of production, they are mobile. Manual workers need the job much more than the job needs them. It may still not be true for all knowledge workers that the organization needs them more than they need the organization. But for most of them it is a symbiotic relationship in which the two need each other in equal measure.
