Management Challenges for the 21st Century
Summary
Peter Drucker wrote this at eighty-nine as a statement of which management assumptions had stopped being true. He argues that the discipline's inherited beliefs were formed for a specific set of conditions and that most of those conditions had changed.
The assumptions he attacks include: that management applies only to business, that there is one right organisational structure, that there is one right way to manage people, that technologies and end-uses are fixed and given, that management's scope is legally defined by the corporation, and that its scope is politically defined by the nation state. Against each he sets a replacement, most importantly that management must be defined by the whole economic process rather than by legal ownership, and that different groups of workers require different forms of management within the same organisation.
The chapters that have proved most durable are the ones on knowledge worker productivity and on managing oneself. Drucker argues that raising knowledge worker productivity is the central management task of the century, that it requires asking what the task is rather than how to do it faster, and that knowledge workers must be treated as volunteers because they own the means of production. The chapter on managing oneself, which asks the reader to identify how they learn, whether they read or listen, and what their values are, has been reprinted separately more than anything else Drucker wrote. The predictions about demographics and about the fragmentation of the corporation were early and largely correct; the chapter on the change leader is thinner.
Key takeaways 7
- There is no single correct organisational structure, and the useful question is which structure suits a given task.
- Knowledge workers own their means of production and can leave with it, so they must be managed as volunteers rather than as subordinates.
- Raising knowledge worker productivity starts with defining the task, which in most knowledge work has never been done explicitly.
- Management's proper scope is the entire economic chain, not the legal entity, because costs and value arise across the chain.
- Falling birth rates in developed countries were the most predictable and least discussed business fact of the coming decades.
- Individuals must now manage their own careers across a working life longer than most organisations last.
- Every organisation should practise organised abandonment, reviewing each product, policy and process against whether it would be started today.
Who should read it
Executives and knowledge workers who want Drucker's most concentrated statement on knowledge work productivity and on managing one's own career.
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.
Where it sits in the reference 2
Similar books 6
Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.
