Father of Modern Management Reading Passage
Father of Modern Management Reading Passage
Paragraph A:
Peter Drucker was one of the most important people to think about management in the last 100 years. He wrote about 40 books and thousands of articles, and he never stopped trying to show the world how important management is. "Management is a part of institutions. It is the part that turns a group of people into an organisation and turns human effort into performance." Did he do well? It was amazing how far his influence went. Drucker's ideas can be found wherever people try to solve hard management problems. This includes big and small organisations, the public and private sectors, and, increasingly, the nonprofit sector.
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Winston Churchill liked his first two books, The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942), but academic critics didn't like how they covered so many different topics. Still, the second of these books got people's attention because it argued passionately that businesses had a social purpose as well as a financial one. The Concept of the Corporation, his third book, was an instant hit and has been in print ever since.
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The two most interesting arguments in The Concept of the Corporation had very little to do with the decentralisation trend. They were going to dominate his work. The first one had to do with "empowering" workers. Drucker thought that workers should be seen as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production, which was the most common at the time. This was partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest worker and partly because they didn't use the creativity of individual workers. The second point had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Drucker said that the world is moving from an "economy of goods" to an "economy of knowledge" and from a society ruled by the industrial proletariat to one ruled by brain workers. He insisted that this had huge implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like parts of a big, cold machine and start treating them like brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realize that knowledge, and therefore education, was the most important resource for any advanced society. Yet Drucker also thought that this economy had effects on knowledge workers themselves. They had to accept that they were neither "bosses" nor "workers," but something in between entrepreneurs who had to develop their most important resource, their brainpower, and who also had to take more control of their careers, including their pension plans.
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But his job was also hard in some ways. Drucker came up with "management by objectives," one of the most successful ideas from the rational school of management. In 1954's The Practice of Management, one of his most important books, he talked about how important it was for managers and businesses to set clear long-term goals and then turn those long-term goals into more immediate goals. He said that companies should have an elite group of general managers who set these long-term goals, and then another group of more specialised managers. For his critics, this was a change from the way he used to talk about the human side of management. Drucker thought that everything fit together perfectly: if you put too much faith in empowerment, you risk anarchy, and if you put too much faith in command and control, you lose creativity. Managers should set long-term goals but then let their employees figure out how to reach those goals. Drucker may have helped make management a global field, but he also pushed it outside of business. He was a thinker about management, not just business. He thought that management is "the organ that defines all modern institutions," not just companies.
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Drucker's work is often criticized for three reasons. The first is that he focused on big companies instead of small ones. In many ways, The Concept of the Corporation was a tribute to big organisations. Drucker said, "We know now that in modern industrial production, especially modern mass production, the small unit is not only inefficient, it can't produce at all." The book helped start the "big organization boom" that dominated business thinking for the next 20 years. The second complaint is that Drucker's enthusiasm for management by objectives led the business down a dead end. They prefer that ideas, including ideas for long-term strategies, come from the bottom and middle of the organisation, not from the top. Third, Drucker is criticised for being an outsider who is getting left behind as his field becomes more strict. There is no area of academic management theory that he made his own.
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The first two arguments have some merit. Drucker never wrote anything else as good as The Concept of the Corporation about how entrepreneurs start businesses. Drucker's work on "management by objectives" doesn't fit well with his earlier and later writings on how important knowledge workers and self-directed teams are. But the third argument is short-sighted and unfair because it doesn't take into account Drucker's role as a pioneer in creating the modern profession of management. He made one of the first organised studies of a big company. He was the first person to suggest that ideas can help companies get going. The biggest problem with judging Drucker's impact is that so many of his ideas have become common knowledge. He is a victim of his success. His writings about the importance of knowledge workers and giving people power may sound a bit boring now. But they weren't boring when he first thought of them in the 1940s or when they were first used in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s. In addition, Drucker kept coming up with new ideas until he was in his 90s. His work on how to run non-profit organisations remained at the cutting edge.
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