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The Practice of Management (Paperback)
by Peter F. Drucker
| Category:
Management |
| Market price: ¥ 228.00
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¥ 178.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Another wonderfully Typical Drucker read on the science of management. |
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Author: Peter F. Drucker
Publisher: Collins; Reissue edition
Pub. in: October, 2006
ISBN: 0060878975
Pages: 416
Measurements: 8.1 x 5.3 x 1.0 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00038
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- MSL Picks -
The late Peter F. Drucker is the most influential management thinker of the 20th Century. This book was first published in 1955 and consists of five parts plus a proper introduction and conclusion. Drucker, in the Preface, explains that the first aim of this book "is to narrow the gap between what can be done and what is being done, between the leaders in management and the average".
The Introduction - The Nature of Management - consists of three chapters. Within the first chapter Drucker explains that "the manager is the dynamic, life-giving element in every business" and that management "is the organ of society specifically charged with making resources productive, that is, with the responsibility for organized economic advance." In the second chapter Drucker explains that "management is the least known and the least understood of our institutions" and discusses the three functions of management: managing a business, managing managers, and to manage workers and work. The third chapter states that management faces its first test of its competence and its hardest task in the then imminent industrial revolution called `automation'. Drucker does explain that automation is not `technical', but primarily a system of concepts, a concept of the organization of work.
The first of six chapters within Part I - Managing a Business - uses the Sears, Roebuck & Company as an illustration of what business is and what managing it means. Based upon this illustration, Drucker concludes in Chapter 5 that "there is only one valid definition of business: to create a customer. ... It is the customer who determines what a business is." Chapter 6 introduces Drucker's most famous question: "What is our business - and what should it be?" This does look relatively simple, but it is not simple to answer and the author provides guidance. In the next chapter the objectives of a business are discussed: "Objectives are needed in every area where performance and results directly and vitally affect the survival and prosperity of the business." Chapter 8 discusses the tools that management needs to take make decisions today for the result of tomorrow. But no matter how sound the business economics, how careful the analysis, how good the tools, managing a business always comes back to the human element. This is the subject of Chapter 9, which deals with the principles of production.
The first of the six chapters within Part II - Managing Managers - uses automobile company Ford to explain that the "fundamental problem or order, structure, motivation and leadership in the business enterprise have to be solved in the managing of managers." But he also warns that managers are its scarcest resource. Drucker also introduces the major requirements of managing managers, which are detailed in the next five chapters.
The first of the three chapters within Part III - The Structure of Management - discusses the issue of organization structure. The next chapter is concerned with building the structure. Chapter 18 deals with the small, the large and the growing business, which Drucker breaks down into four stages of business size (small, fair-sized, large, very large business). He discusses the problems and potential solutions for each.
The six chapters within Part IV - The Management of Worker and Work - discuss the human elements of business. Drucker uses IBM as an example to show basic problems in managing worker and work, and some of the principles for their solution. He also emphasizes that the management of worker and work is a complex subject. Within Chapter 20 he discusses the worker as a resource, the demands of the enterprise on the worker, the worker's demands on the enterprise, and the economic dimension. The next chapter explains that although personnel management is not bankrupt ("but certainly insolvent") the relationship between a man and the kind of work he does is known due to the Human-Relations school. Chapter 22 details human organization for peak performance or in Drucker's words "the engineering of the individual job for maximum efficiency." The fourth chapter in this section discusses the economic relationship between enterprise and worker. This is followed by chapters on the first-line supervisor and on the professional employee (who is neither management nor labor).
The title of the final part - What It Means to be a Manager - gives away the subject for the three chapters. Drucker believes that a manager has two specific tasks: "The manager has the task of creating a true whole that is larger than the sum of its parts, a productive entity that turns out more than the sum of the resources put into it. ...This task requires the manager to bring out and make effective whatever strength there is in his resources - and above all in the human resources - and neutralize whatever there is of weakness." This requires the manager to balance and harmonize the three major functions of the business enterprise: managing a business, managing managers, and managing worker and work. Chapter 28 deals with decision making. The five phases in decision-making are discussed. The final chapter discusses the manager of tomorrow. Based upon the new demands required, the manager of tomorrow has to acquit himself of seven new tasks.
The book is concluded with a proper conclusion on the responsibilities of management. "... the business enterprise must be so managed as to make the public good become the private good of the enterprise. ...To make certain that this assertion does not remain lip service but becomes hard fact is the most important, the ultimate responsibility of management: to itself, to the enterprise, to our heritage, to our society and to our way of life."
What can one say about a masterpiece like this? Books by Peter Drucker always deserve five stars since they are eye-openers to most of us, but this one is exceptional and possibly the best I have read by him. Highly recommended to anybody involved with management or working within business enterprise, it provides great insights for employees through to chief executive. (From quoting Gerard Kroese, The Netherlands)
Target readers:
Executives, managers, entrepreneurs, government and non-profit leaders, professionals, academics, and MBAs.
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Peter F. Drucker was considered one of management's top thinkers. As the author of more than 35 books, his ideas have had an enormous impact on shaping the modern corporation. In 2002, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. During his lifetime, Drucker was a writer, teacher, philosopher, reporter, consultant, and professor at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University.
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From the Publisher:
Father of modern management, social commentator, and preeminent business philosopher, Peter F. Drucker has been analyzing economics and society for more than 60 years. A classic since its publication in 1954, The Practice of Management has been a continuing international bestseller for more than 40 years. It was the first book to look at management as a whole, the first to depict management as a distinct function, managing as specific work, and being a manager as a separate responsibility. The Practice of Management created the discipline of modern management practices and – readable, fundamental and basic – it remains an essential book for students, aspiring managers, and seasoned practitioners.
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The manager is the dynamic, life-giving element in every business. Without his leadership the "resources of production" remain resources and never become production. In a competitive economy, above all, the quality and performance of the managers determine the success of a business, indeed they determine its survival. For the quality and performance of its managers is the only effective advantage an enterprise in a competitive economy can have.
Management is also a distinct and a leading group in industrial society. We no longer talk of "capital" and "labor"; we talk of "management" and "labor." The responsibilities of capital "have disappeared from our vocabulary together with the 'rights of capital'," instead, we hear of the "responsibilities of management," and (a singularly hapless phrase) of the "prerogatives of management." We are building up a comprehensive and distinct system of “education for management." And when the Eisenhower Administration was formed in 1952, it was formed consciously as a "Management Administration."
The emergence of management as an essential, a distinct and a leading institution is a pivotal event in social history. Rarely, if ever, has a new basic institution, a new leading group, emerged as fast as has management since the turn of this century. Rarely in human history has a new institution proven indispensable so quickly; and even less often has a new institution arrived with so little opposition, so little disturbance, so little controversy.
Management will remain a basic and dominant institution perhaps as long as Western civilization itself survives. For management is not only grounded in the nature of modern industrial system and in the needs of the modern business enterprise to which an industrial system must entrust its productive resources – both human and material. Management also expresses basic beliefs of modern Western society. It expresses the belief in the possibility of controlling man's livelihood through systematic organization of economic resources. It expresses the belief that economic change can be made into the most powerful engine for human betterment and social justice – that, as Jonathan Swift first overstated it two hundred and fifty years ago, whoever makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before deserves better of mankind than any speculative philosopher or metaphysical system builder.
This belief that the material can and should be used to advance the human spirit is not just the old-age human heresy "materialism." In fact, it is incompatible with materialism as the term has always been understood. It is something new, distinctly modern, distinctly Western. Prior to, and outside of, the modern West, resources have always been considered a limit to man's activities, a restriction on his control over his environment – rather than an opportunity and a tool of his control over nature. They have always been considered a God-given and unchangeable. Indeed all societies, except the modern West, have looked upon economic change as a danger to society and individual alike, and have considered it the first responsibility of government to keep the economy unchangeable.
Management, which is the organ of society specifically charged with making resources productive, that is, with the responsibility for organized economic advance, therefore reflects the basic spirit of the modern age. It is in fact indispensable – and this explains why, once begotten, it grew so fast and with so little opposition.
The Importance of Management
Management, its competence, its integrity and its performance will be decisive to the United states and to the free world in the decades ahead. At the same time the demands on management will be rising steadily and steeply.
A "Cold War" of indefinite duration not only puts heavy economic burdens on the economy, which only continuous economic advance can make bearable; it demands ability to satisfy the country's military needs while building up, at the same time, an expanding peacetime economy. It demands, indeed, an unprecedented ability of the entire economy to shift back and forth between peacetime and defense production, practically at an instant's notice. This demand, on the satisfaction of which our survival may well depend, is above all a demand on the competence of the managements, especially of our big enterprises.
That the United States is the leader today, economically and socially, will make management performance decisive – and adequate management performance much harder. From the peak there is only one easy way to go: downwards. It always requires twice as much effort and skill to stay up as it did to climb up. In other words, there is real danger that in retrospect the United States of 1950 will come to look like the Great Britain of 1880 0 doomed to decline for lack of vision and lack of effort. There are evidences of a tendency in this country to defend what we have rather than advance further; capital equipment is getting old in many industries; productivity is improving fast only in the very new industries, and may be stagnant if not declining in many others. Only superior management competence and continuously improved management performance can keep us progressing, can prevent our becoming smug, self-satisfied and lazy.
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| Outside the United States management has an even more decisive function and an even tougher job. Whether Europe regains her economic prosperity depends, above all, on the performance of her managements. And whether the formerly colonial and raw-material producing countries will succeed in developing their economies as free nations or will go Communist, depends to a large extent on their ability to produce competent and responsible managers in a hurry. Truly, the entire free world has an immense stake in the competence, skill and responsibility of management. (From Chapter 1: The Role of Management) |
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| View all 11 comments |
Warren Bennis (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
(Peter Drucker is)The most important management thinker of our time. |
Andrew S. Grove, President (Intel Corporation) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Peter Drucker is a guiding light to a whole lot of us. When I see an article of his I drop everything else and read it on the spot. |
Wall Street Journal (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
The dean of this country's business and management philosophers. |
Fortune magazine (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 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. |
View all 11 comments |
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