Honoring Peter F. Drucker

A tip of the hat and a note of thanks to Peter F. Drucker, who passed away last week, at age 95. Drucker was considered by many to be the father of modern management, and was most certainly among the more persistent voices bringing a human and social perspective to the profit-making world. Beyond that, he was an early and active proponent of the nonprofit sector, as both an essential engine of society and a complex management challenge.

As business schools and management gurus were pushing technical excellence, technology innovation, and ”command and control,” Drucker focused on the human qualities of leadership and the need for clear and compelling goals. Both elements are evident in this excerpt from his essay on ”Management as Social Function and Liberal Art,” which defines both for-profit and nonprofit management as essentially human endeavors.

• Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant. This is what organization is all about, and it is the reason that management is the critical, determining factor….
• Because management deals with the integration of people in a common venture, it is deeply embedded in culture. What managers do in West Germany, in the United Kingdom, in the United States, in Japan, or in Brazil is exactly the same. How they do it may be quite different….
• Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is not enterprise; there is only a mob. The enterprise must have simple, clear, and unifying objectives. The mission of the organization has to be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision. The goals that embody it have to be clear, public, and constantly reaffirmed. Management’s first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives, values, and goals.
• Management must also enable the enterprise and each of its members to grow and develop as needs and opportunities change. Every enterprise is a learning and teaching institution. Training and development must be built into it on all levels — training and development that never stop.
• Every enterprise is composed of people with different skills and knowledge doing many different kinds of work. It must be built on communication and on individual responsibility….
• Neither the quantity of output nor the ”bottom line” is by itself an adequate measure of the performance of management and enterprise. Market standing, innovation, productivity, development of people, quality, financial results — all are crucial to an organization’s performance and to its survival.
  …
• Finally, the single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside. The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a healed patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise, there are only costs.
  

The L.A. Times article announcing his death also references his fondness for the orchestra as a modern management metaphor:

”Each institution has to do its own work the way each instrument in an orchestra plays only its own part. But there is also the score, the community. And only if each individual instrument contributes to the score, there is music.”

Amen.

NOTE: For more on Drucker’s work with nonprofit management and leadership, see the Leader to Leader Institute, the current iteration of his Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.