CLASSIC DRUCKER

CLASSIC  DRUCKER

From the pages of

Harvard Business Review

Peter F Drucker

Harvard Business Press

Pp 221   $14.95

If the Holy Scriptures were to be reviewed, the comments will be on the publisher’s efforts, not on the content of the message. The reviewer has to stop at the stage of marvelling at the timelessness of that message with the hope with bated breath that his comments do not hurt someone’s sensibilities somewhere. So it is with the work of Peter Ferdinand Drucker, born on November 19, 1909 in Vienna. 

Drucker had but to die (November 11, 2005) for the rivers of what-I-know-about-Drucker to bubble over. It was only a question of time. Best of Peter Drucker on Management (2007), several hundred articles and now Classic Drucker. Fortunately Drucker himself brought out the six-volume Essential Drucker which came out in 2003. 

And in spite of the 60 odd years that this guru of gurus wrote and inspired and educated managers all over the world, through his 26 books, thousands of articles, tens of thousands of lectures, and innumerable occasions of practical advice for managers, there is bound to be a case of repeated articles here and there. Classic Drucker holds one such that was published in another best seller of 2002: Managing in the Next Society. This is the essay entitled They’re not employees, they’re people, a classic by itself, which also appeared in the August 2002 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR). In this essay, Drucker examines the changing dynamics of the workforce – particularly the need for organizations to take as much responsibility when managing contract workers as they do with their traditional employees. Two fast-growing trends need more attention of business leaders, he said. First is the rise of the temporary/contract workers; 8 million to 10 million temp workers are placed each day worldwide, filling every kind of job, all the way up to CEO. Second, a growing number of businesses are outsourcing their employee relations to professional employee organizations (PEOs). Driving these trends, Drucker observes, is the shift to a dependency on specialization and knowledge. But if organizations outsource those functions, they need to be careful not to damage relationship with their people in the process, Drucker concludes: If by off-loading employee relations… organizations lose their capacity to develop people, they will have made a devil’s bargain indeed.

The present collection paints a vast canvas that covers Drucker’s writings from May-June 1963 to June 2004, winding up with an incisive interview (1993) – revealing the master’s thoughts over a generation from the time when those who (in the words of Drucker himself) ‘talked about management… were considered more or less deranged.’

Thomas A. Stewart, HBR editor, has done a commendable job in the selection of articles. Starting with the basics of management, Managing Oneself (one’s strengths, one’s performance, one’s values and one’s responsibility for relationships) and going on through The Theory of Business the collection moves from the manager’s responsibilities to the world of the Executive. The article entitled What Makes an Effective Executive, we are told, won the McKinsey Award for the seventh time in 2005. it appears at serial number 9 in this collection. The award is presented to the authors of the best article published in the previous year in the HBR. Effectiveness, he says, is a discipline; the demand for it is much too great to be satisfied by extraordinary talent. The article covers eight practices. The first two (What Needs to be Done and What Is Right For The Enterprise) give the executive the knowledge he needs. The next four (Developing Action Plans, Taking Responsibility for Decisions, Taking Responsibility for Communicating and Focus on Opportunities rather than on Problems) help him convert the knowledge into effective action. The last two (Running Productive Meetings and Thinking/Saying ‘We’ rather than ‘I’) ensure that the whole organisation felt responsible and accountable. Incidentally, HBR first published Drucker’s article in 1950 when he was around 41 years old – significantly entitled: Management Must Manage.

Revealing Drucker at his classic best, the collection only proves the timelessness of his thinking – a reference book for all times for those who would genuinely like to make effective decisions, enhance one’s organisation's innovative capabilities and most importantly, to raise knowledge workers' productivity. A message lucidly told.