People and Performance
Selected essays on management
Summary
The reference has not verified this book in detail; the summary states only what the title, author and subject establish.
This is an anthology of Peter Drucker's writing on management, assembled from his books published up to the mid-1970s and organised thematically. Drucker selected the pieces and wrote connecting commentary.
The selections cover the material he considered central: the responsibilities of management, the purpose of the business, the manager's work, objectives and self-control, the structure of organisations, the management of people and of knowledge workers, innovation, and the manager's own effectiveness. The sources include The Practice of Management, Managing for Results, The Effective Executive and Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.
As an anthology it develops no argument of its own and duplicates material available in the source books. Its use is as a single-volume introduction for a reader who does not want to work through the full treatises. Readers who intend to read Drucker at length should go to The Practice of Management and Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices instead, since this book is drawn from them.
Key takeaways 6
- Management is a practice with its own body of knowledge rather than an application of economics or psychology.
- The purpose of a business lies outside it, in the customer, which makes marketing and innovation the functions that produce results.
- Managers should be directed by objectives they participate in setting and controlled by their own measurement of results against them.
- Knowledge workers must be managed differently from manual workers because they know more about their task than their supervisor does.
- Effectiveness is a set of habits that can be learned rather than a personal quality some managers possess.
- Organisation structure should follow from the results required rather than from any general principle of design.
Who should read it
Readers who want a single-volume introduction to Drucker assembled by Drucker, though the source books state the arguments more fully.
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