While Peter Drucker was not the earliest writer on management, he added significantly to post-WW2 understanding. \u00a0First, he argued it was vital to study business and the legal, social, and ethical consequences of its freedoms to choose its purposes and practices. \u00a0Second, endorsing America\u2019s distinctive contribution to business thinking – prioritizing the customer – he anticipated our often-breathless talk of rapid market, social, and technology change, and of managing as a global rather than local practice. \u00a0Third, he pointed to change within organizations. \u00a0While managers had been managing work for centuries, organizational work was changing. \u00a0He coined the term \u2018knowledge worker\u2019 to capture the huge shift from tangible to intangible assets as the key drivers of business success – evident in asset-light firms like Twitter and Uber. \u00a0Fourth, he argued managing was never mere application of theory; it was always a craft \u00a0– practical, hands on, and never entirely computable.<\/p>\n
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Sometimes the urgency of a business\u2019s responses to changes beyond drowns out what is going on within it. \u00a0How a business generates economic value remains a puzzle. \u00a0Customer satisfaction is one thing, profit quite another. \u00a0Despite Drucker\u2019s many insights into the workings of the socio-economy he did not explain how economic value arises. \u00a0Management\u2019s presumably central role remained – and remains – unclear. \u00a0Economists label this puzzle the \u2018theory of the firm\u2019. \u00a0Drucker went beyond pre-WW2 thinking based on military order, control, and efficiency. \u00a0He refreshed the path-breaking work, for instance, of Chester Barnard and Mary Parker Follett, arguing inspiring leadership lay at the core of managers\u2019 practice and had psychological, ethical, and moral dimensions that demanded full attention. \u00a0Thus he helped propel today\u2019s psychology-based nostrums, often delivered as lists of managers\u2019 \u2018secrets\u2019 or \u2018steps to winning\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u2018Big data\u2019 is new on managers\u2019 radar. \u00a0Its impact is direct, on the business\u2019s processes rather than on the participants\u2019 motivation. \u00a0Business strategy is based on the facts of the situation and big data provides managers with a stunning magic telescope to reveal facts and relations otherwise hidden in the \u2018fog of commerce\u2019. \u00a0Its power is so considerable many writers assert business survival depends on deploying big data correctly. \u00a0Wiser commentators push back against any naivet\u00e9, pointing to the central place of the \u2018human element\u2019. \u00a0Newer telescopes do indeed provide more detail, but it remains up to us to \u2018connect the dots\u2019 and make sense of what is seen, to address the most profound of a business\u2019s questions: \u201cWhat does it mean for us?\u201d<\/p>\n
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At first sight Drucker\u2019s contribution was to remind us that managing is not as mechanical as many suggest, rather it is a human practice embedded in the tangled weave of our ambitions, relations, and politics. \u00a0Many commentators write about making organizational life more sympathetic and here Drucker was clearly in the van. \u00a0Maybe closer attention to ethics, social responsibility, and ecology will improve us. \u00a0But his \u2018knowledge worker\u2019 moves us in a different direction that may prove even more important. \u00a0Rather than the interaction between hardness of goal-directed labor and the softness of our social, political, or psychological natures, he reminded us of the complexity of human knowing. \u00a0This is essential to gauging the impact of big data and its limits. \u00a0In spite of the flood of exciting news about the mind, computation, and artificial intelligence, Drucker\u2019s notion of \u2018knowledge\u2019 was radical because it looked beyond computable facts. \u00a0What we mean by the human element is tied up with our sense that \u2018the facts\u2019 are never all we know about our world or ourselves; facts never fully determine our practice. \u00a0We have passions, culture, and a history. \u00a0Drucker\u2019s knowledge worker presumed those other aspects of human knowing that are essential to understanding the human condition – and profit – as non-mechanical and, perhaps most significant of all, deeply shaped by our imagination.<\/p>\n
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As we know, we do not live by bread (facts) alone, but also by the word. \u00a0Organizations are contexts of managerially-generated \u2018natural language\u2019 or communication with words, signals, and symbols that excite and shape the imaginations of others. \u00a0Natural language goes way beyond logical \u2018formal language\u2019, proofs and formulae, to shape others\u2019 non-factual ways of knowing. \u00a0A poem is not a rigorous equation; yet it has power to persuade precisely because we are creatures of emotion and imagination. \u00a0Ultimately leadership is persuading others to do things they would not do otherwise – through passion rather than proof. \u00a0Hence management\u2019s most powerful tool is persuasive language rather than data. \u00a0A value-creating business is a poem in motion, an opera perhaps; not a well-structured data repository.<\/p>\n
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Our insatiable appetite for natural language-interaction drives our newest industries just as Adam Smith noted our tendency to \u2018truck and barter\u2019. \u00a0A Twitter message of 140 characters, surely the opposite of big data, is seldom a packet of dry data. \u00a0Perhaps it is a haiku or a sonnet. \u00a0It impacts someone\u2019s living. \u00a0No question, data is often material but never all we need to determine practice in the lived world. \u00a0Real time big data may alert a retailer to a product flying off the shelves, but what does it mean? \u00a0Likewise data from a drone may suggest, perhaps, a rooftop sniper. \u00a0What is revealed turns on how we respond to the data. \u00a0Is the item underpriced? \u00a0Is the figure someone sleeping? \u00a0Do movements at a North Korean site reveal a nuclear test? \u00a0Obviously the boundaries around big data\u2019s capabilities and practice are changing fast, with the \u2018internet of things\u2019 as much as with deeper mining of ever more voluminous data. \u00a0But the strategic meaning of what is revealed is never contained in the data gathered. \u00a0Facts never \u2018speak for themselves\u2019; their meaning is always embedded in how we live. \u00a0Management\u2019s skill lies in layering the knowing they distill from their business\u2019s living over the data they gather. \u00a0Big or small, the data question is always strategic: \u201cWhat does it mean to us?\u201d<\/p>\n
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About the author:<\/strong><\/p>\n JC Spender trained first as a nuclear engineer then in computing with IBM. \u00a0He moved into academe as a strategy theorist, opening up a subjectivist\/creative approach that complements mainstream rational planning notions of strategizing. \u00a0This 40-year project was brought to completion in Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise (OUP 2014).<\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While Peter Drucker was not the earliest writer on management, he added significantly to post-WW2 understanding. \u00a0First, he argued it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":""},"categories":[144],"tags":[99,103],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849"}],"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=849"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":852,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions\/852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}