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The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (平装)
by Peter F. Drucker
| Category:
Management |
| Market price: ¥ 208.00
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¥ 158.00
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MSL rating:
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A truly essential reading of Peter Drucker and a good way to start Drucker. |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 8 items |
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Fortune magazine (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
Drucker's idea continue to display a force and resonance that leave him pretty much in a class by himself. It's impossible to read the man without learning a lot. |
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Harvard Business Review (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
His writings are landmarks of managerial profession. |
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Serge Steenskiste (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
The Essential Drucker is an excellent introduction to the Peter Drucker's writings on management. Some readers, understandably, complain that the book is so general on some topics, that its practical value is sometimes limited. Ultimately, this recapitulation of Drucker's essential thoughts about management is an invitation to rethink some commonly accepted views on management. If one needs convincing on this point, consider the following ten examples:
1) Contrary to popular belief, management and entrepreneurship are not opposite, but complimentary (pg. 8, 136-143, and 161-188). An established company that does not innovate, is regularly doomed to what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. As Clayton Christensen demonstrates brilliantly in The Innovator's Dilemma, innovation is sometimes not even enough to avert business failure. Similarly, a poorly managed start-up will often end up broken (pg. 144-160).
2) One of the three tasks of management is managing social impacts and social responsibilities. The recent wave of corporate scandals unfortunately illustrates this point too well, often with disastrous consequences for their authors and the stakeholders who have a key interest in the success of the organization (pg. 16-20). Profit is not the explanation, cause or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but rather the test of their validity as Drucker states (pg. 18).
3) Neither is there a separate ethics of business, nor one is needed. The ethics of responsibility is plain, everyday honesty. The issue is one of moral values and moral education of the individual. As Drucker bluntly points out, all that is needed is to mete stiff punishments to those - whether business executives or others - who yield to temptation (pg. 63-64).
4) Few organizations reach at least 30% of all potential customers in any market. And yet few organizations know anything about the non-customers (pg. 85). To start changing this, organizations have to understand what existing and potential customers really value in a product or service. This desired value is not necessarily what the supplier sells (pg. 86, 111, 148, 186).
5) Each manager should have the information he needs to measure his own performance and should receive it soon enough to make any necessary changes. Yet in most organizations, the results of the audits do not go to the managers audited, but to the top management who then confronts these managers with the audit of their operations (pg. 121-122). Management by self-control is more productive than management by domination to achieve excellence.
6) Most executives do not perform very well when they promote or hire. By all accounts, only one-third of such decisions turn out to be right; one-third are minimally effective; one-third are outright failures. In no other area of management is such dismissal performance tolerated (pg. 127). Drucker also reminds his readers that it is not intuitively obvious to most people that a new and different job requires a new and different behavior (pg. 132, 211).
7) Few people realize that many people make decisions within organizations. Knowledge workers who are considered partners rather than employees, can only be helped. The close supervision of knowledge workers is often illusory because of their unique expertise. Only effectiveness that focuses on contribution, transforms intelligence, imagination and knowledge into results (pg. 192-193, 196, 207).
8) Warm feelings and pleasant words are meaningless, if there is no achievement in what is, after all, a work-focused and task-focused relationship. An occasional rough word will not disturb a relationship that produces results and accomplishments for all concerned according to Drucker (pg. 213-214).
9) Many business policy statements contain no action commitment. No wonder that the people in the organization tend to view these statements cynically because they do not reflect top management's true intentions (pg. 249).
10) Leadership has little to do with leadership qualities and even less to do with charisma. Leadership is a means that is mundane, unromantic and boring. Its essence is performance (pg. 268). The key characteristics of leadership are hard work, clear and legitimate goals, responsibility, trust and integrity (pg. 269-271). |
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M. Strong, USA (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
Peter Drucker is the father of modern management theory and has never been equaled or surpassed in terms of his theories or their usability. The problem with Drucker is that over the course of sixty highly productive years, he's put out more books than it is practical for almost anyone to read. This book addresses that issue for those of us who would like the best parts in one book.
The mark of the finest minds is the ability to clearly and simply articulate ideas that make you wonder "why didn't I think of that?" Once stated, Drucker's ideas are so obvious, but I almost never find any that I came up with on my own and have never put the ideas into words as concisely as he does time after time.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in running a better business. My copy is dog-eared, underlined, marked-up and otherwise worn. |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
Peter Drucker has had a truly unique perspective and influence on the development of modern organizational management practices. He is old enough to have known Alfred Sloan of General Motors, and was a studious observer of the rise of the modern corporation, all the way through to its present most advanced state, the post-industrial knowledge-based corporation. Furthermore, Drucker has made major contributions over the decades to management theory and practice, through his books, teaching, consulting, and many articles in publications such as the Harvard Business Review. He has studied a broad span of management topics, from organizational behavior to individual behavior to the impact of organizations and businesses on society. He is even a bit of a futurist. So, who better to have one's life work collected into a single volume, to provide an overview of 20th century management theory?
The Essential Drucker (TED) is definitely worth reading, for anyone with a modicum of interest in organizational management. For someone like myself, with a good number of years in business, it served as an excellent refresher course and validated many of my own beliefs about management, and the teachings that I've received through other channels. Drucker's writings are the antithesis of faddish, flaky management theories; he advocates a very solid, non-flashy, heads-down, customer and results focused approach to management that also manages to be humane. There are so many nuggets of wisdom sprinkled throughout TED that I would not be doing justice to the book to highlight only a few of them. One impression that comes across strongly, reading thoughts that Drucker put to paper decades ago, is just how true and applicable they are today.
Having heaped much praise on Drucker and TED, I'm obligated to point out the book's major flaw, which is a function of the way it was put together. Drucker has produced so much writing on so many topics that it is perhaps an impossible task to condense the highlights into a single volume, and still retain anything close to the full force of his arguments. Reading TED, it appears that what most often was edited out (but not always, to be fair) was the evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) in support of his theories. You still get the theories and the declarative statements, but what is often missing is the supporting evidence and examples of the application of the theories, to provide a proper context. A veteran manager can supply these from one's own personal experience, as I was often able to do, but I feel that inexperienced readers, such as the students who Drucker claims are part of the target audience for TED, might struggle with the book.
Given that Drucker and his editor decided to make a single volume rather than two or three, TED is a worthwhile summary of a lifetime's work from a great management thinker, and a decent overall survey of 20th century management theory and practices. |
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Lars Bergstrom (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
The chapters in this book are selected from a series of other Drucker books, resulting in a little bit of overlap. However, that one fault doesn't detract from what this is: the premier single-source introduction to management theory and practice. I'd highly advise this to anyone who is worried about improvement for themselves, their teams, and their business. An additional nicety is that each of the chapters are also annotated with their original source so that you can pick up a copy of the original tome if you want to go deeper.
I was particularly impressed by his chapters on personal and team effectiveness and on exactly at what stage in business planning you should worry about profitability. The effectiveness advice is dead-on (concentrate periods of productivity, enable your peers and subordinates to do so, and concentrate on work that is useful for your business), and the advice on when to bring profitability into the business product planning mix puts a lot of the short-term profit-first material on its head. |
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Kumar (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
I have to admit that I am a latecomer to Drucker. I decided to give it a try when someone whom I respect immensely mentioned his name in passing. As there are about 50 books/essays to choose from, I picked this based solely on the title (and the reviews, of course!).
I have to say that I have been very impressed with the clarity of thought, the simplicity of his ideas, and more importantly the longevity of his advice (considering that some of his initial work was with GM when Alfred Sloan was around). I, perhaps like other people, mistakenly wrote Drucker off in favor of new authors on the block. However, that's been my loss until recently.
Furthermore, I decided to try some of his ideas relating to performance management, employee morale and setting expectations - the bread and butter of most business settings. The simplicity of his ideas coupled with their easy applicability is what impressed me. I will definitely try some of his other books, having gone through this and would recommend this to anyone else not sure about Drucker.
So, why the 4 stars instead of 5? The book, in an attempt to cover his best writings, covers everything from business strategy to social entrepreneurship to business history. That leaves the reader wanting more details and examples in the individual articles. |
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Arajit (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
While I have read a few Durcker articles before, this has been the first Drucker book I read. I am not going into the TOC in details, in short, the topics have been organized nicely. It starts with management, flows smoothly into individual, and ends at society. The attention towards chronology also worked well for me in grasping the evolution of the for-profit organizations over the years.
Each article deserves its individual appreciation, but I must mention a few of those that struck most. To start with, the responsibility of the professional. The article brings up examples from the Hippocratic Oath for the medical practitioners, not all, but only the "Premium Non Nocere". Even after hundreds of years passed by, this particular point not only remains valid but spread its relevance over other professions as well.
The Second Half of Life is another one to describe how knowledge workers' career shifts over his/her age. It also emphasize the preparatory work even before the actual shift, more similar to the way Steven Covey described the quadrant-two activities. My opinion on this article is a must-read for every knowledge worker.
Towards the end, there is one article focusing on the post-capitalist society. Mr. Drucker candidly expressed his inability to draw a true picture, but at the same time quite correctly outlined the big picture. Whether post-capitalism would mean the end of capitalism could be a big debate, since over the years, the influence imparted by the capital movements around the globe becomes more and more significant. However, the evolution of capitalism is itself a true phenomenon.
A good book to start on Drucker's writings. |
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1 Total 1 pages 8 items |
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