{"id":3287,"date":"2021-06-21T18:55:10","date_gmt":"2021-06-21T16:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/?p=3287"},"modified":"2021-08-20T15:53:41","modified_gmt":"2021-08-20T13:53:41","slug":"on-re-reading-peter-drucker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/on-re-reading-peter-drucker\/","title":{"rendered":"On re-reading Peter Drucker<\/strong>
by Simon Caulkin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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When I first read PD in the 1970s, I didn\u2019t really get him. The volumes dropping on my desk \u2013 Post-Capitalist Society<\/em>, The New Realities,<\/em> or, bafflingly, Landmarks of Tomorrow \u2013<\/em> appeared to have little bearing on management, and some of his famous one-liners seemed to me both obvious and obscure.\u2018The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer\u2019. \u2018Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.\u2019 \u2018Management and managers are the \u2026 constitutive organ of society\u2019. What did these even mean?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I should have paid more attention to his titles. They are the clue to Drucker\u2019s significance, and the reason why it is not an exaggeration to say that the first \u2018Day of Drucker\u2019 on 30 June is an event of historic importance. The day is not about paying homage to the \u2018father of management\u2019 \u2013 a title that like his sayings is both true and only a tiny part of the whole. It is about facing up to our unique and sometimes uncomfortable responsibilities in a time that is nearly as perilous as that in which Drucker grew up in 1930s Vienna \u2013 and informs everything he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Day of Drucker 2021<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>
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This article is one in the \u201cshape the debate\u201d series relating to A Day of Drucker<\/a><\/span> on June 30, 2021.
<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Re-reading Drucker today, the paradox hits you on the head with the force of a flying mallet. The reason Drucker stands apart from nearly all other management writers is that he wasn\u2019t primarily interested in management<\/em>.  \u2018Management was neither my first nor has it been my foremost concern. I only became interested in it because of my work on community and society\u2019, he wrote later. And counterintuitive as it seems, that is precisely why his view of management is so urgently relevant to now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Drucker, the reason management matters is so simple and fundamental it usually goes unnoticed. Management is a means to an end, not an end in itself. That end is a free and functioning society, which \u2013 as was evident to an enquiring young European starting his career under the shadow of totalitarianism \u2013 can\u2019t exist in the absence of thriving independently-run organisations and institutions. They in turn depend on good management. The only alternative to bad management is a command economy (\u2018at least they make the trains run on time\u2019). That is what he meant by management being \u2018constitutive\u2019: \u2018Performing, responsible management is the alternative to tyranny and our only protection against it.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything else follows from this. For Drucker, management is a moral profession, with a duty primum non nocere<\/em>, first to do no harm. Companies are part of society and therefore have a direct stake in its health; too systemically important to be under the sway of any single stakeholder, they and their managers have a non-negotiable obligation to put the resources society allots them to productive and effective use. Profit is a test of their effectiveness \u2013 and, critically, the essential down payment on the cost of the future jobs and products they will provide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, although absolutely essential (and he fiercely criticised managers for failing to explain why this was so), profit is no more a company\u2019s purpose than a human\u2019s is to breathe. Already in the 1980s, Drucker was alarmed to see managers and capitalism being carried away by the blind pursuit of money and profit. He hated managers benefiting directly from laying people off. Capitalism could not be an end goal in itself: \u2018Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can only be justified as being good for society,\u2019 he wrote in The Practice of Management<\/em>, as early as 1954.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You don\u2019t have to agree with everything Drucker said to see many further resonances with today. He would have recognised the super-spreading surveillance business model for what it is, the business equivalent of Covid and perhaps the clearest and most present threat to society. He\u2019d have been contemptuous of assertions by ideologues that the warp-speed delivery of Covid vaccines was due to \u2018greed\u2019 and \u2018capitalism\u2019. On the contrary, he would have described it as a too-rare case of his \u2018society of institutions\u2019 working as it should, a joint effort by government, public and private sector united behind a single purpose \u2013 and as such a blueprint for much needed institutional innovation ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Covid is an existential moment for management, amplifying existing challenges at the same time as it opens up a tantalising vision of a different future. The last half century has been fundamentally hostile to Drucker\u2019s idea of management as a central organ of free society, privileging instead the \u2018business of business of business is business\u2019 model, based on the economists\u2019 stunted axiom of human self interest. In 1962, Milton Friedman, one of the latter\u2019s chief progenitors, wrote that \u2018Only a crisis \u2014 actual or perceived \u2014 produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, the boot is now on the other foot. As the neo-liberal \u2018Washington consensus\u2019 gives way to what the FT<\/em> after the recent G7 summit in the UK refers to as a more inclusive, resilient and planet-aware \u2018Cornish consensus\u2019<\/a>, the alternative ideas \u2018lying around\u2019 are those of Peter Drucker. Whether they concern the entrepreneurial society, the institutional infrastructure or the management of individual organisations, they are a perfect fit for the job to be done. That<\/em> is why the Day of Drucker is important \u2013 not as a cause for celebration but as a practical start to the managerial heavy lifting that will be needed to bring the \u2018new realities\u2019 and \u2018post-capitalist society\u2019 of Drucker\u2019s titles into being. To misquote him only slightly, warm words, like plans, are useless \u2018unless it all immediately degenerates into hard work’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the Author:<\/strong>
Simon Caulkin <\/em><\/strong>is senior editor for the Drucker Forum.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is one in the \u201cshape the debate\u201d series relating to A Day of Drucker<\/a> on June 30, 2021.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first read PD in the 1970s, I didn\u2019t really get him. The volumes dropping on my desk \u2013 Post-Capitalist Society, The New Realities, or, bafflingly, Landmarks of Tomorrow \u2013 appeared to have little bearing on management[\u2026]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3251,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":""},"categories":[297],"tags":[300,129],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3287"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3287"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3355,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3287\/revisions\/3355"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}