Classic Drucker
Posthumous HBR collection
Summary
This volume collects fifteen of Peter Drucker's articles from the Harvard Business Review, spanning several decades, selected by the review's editors.
The pieces include several of his most widely cited. What Makes an Effective Executive sets out eight practices: asking what needs to be done, asking what is right for the enterprise, developing action plans, taking responsibility for decisions, taking responsibility for communicating, focusing on opportunities rather than problems, running productive meetings, and thinking and saying we rather than I. Managing Oneself argues that knowledge workers must take responsibility for their own careers, and requires knowing your strengths through feedback analysis, knowing how you perform, knowing your values, and deciding where you belong. The Theory of the Business argues that every organisation operates on assumptions about its environment, its mission and its core competences, that these assumptions were once valid and eventually stop being so, and that the failure of successful companies is nearly always the obsolescence of a theory that continues to be treated as fact.
Other pieces cover the knowledge worker's productivity as the central management problem of the century, the information executives actually need as distinct from what systems produce, innovation and the sources entrepreneurs should systematically examine, and the management of non-profit institutions.
Drucker's method throughout is observation and assertion. He does not conduct research or cite evidence, and readers wanting empirical support will not find it. His writing is unusually clear and his questions are better than most people's answers. This collection is the most efficient way into his work for someone who will not read the books.
Key takeaways 7
- Effective executives ask what needs to be done rather than what they want to do, and act on the answer.
- Every organisation operates on assumptions about its environment, mission and competences, and those assumptions eventually stop being valid.
- Successful companies fail when a theory of the business that was once correct is treated as permanent fact.
- Knowledge workers must manage their own careers, which requires knowing their strengths through recorded feedback rather than through self-assessment.
- Focusing on opportunities rather than problems is a resource allocation decision, since the best people should be assigned to opportunities.
- Innovation should be pursued by systematically examining specific sources of change rather than by waiting for inspiration.
- Executives need information about what happens outside the organisation, and internal systems produce almost none of it.
Who should read it
Executives who want Drucker's most useful articles in one volume rather than working through his books.
About Peter F. Drucker
Management writer and consultant; professor at Bennington, NYU and Claremont Graduate University
He invented management as a field of study, and The Practice of Management and The Effective Executive remain the primary sources every later writer builds on.
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Topics