The Manager's Perspective
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Drucker for dummies
This is an interesting article on Drucker, here. Most of what you read here would seem cliched. Though it would be interesting to bear it in mind that he wrote these, established these.. the very basic premise of thinking about management.
The perils of developing a social science are perhaps best captured in the fault lines between theory and practice. Grand theories, broad in sweep and scope, often come a cropper when applied to complex, real life situations.Or, seemingly timeless insights turn out to be just transient truths. At best, they work in the particularities of a given situation and collapse like the proverbial deck of cards when external circumstances change.
It is to Peter Drucker's (1909-2005) enduring credit that he made management into, as he famously put it, a practice -- a set of purposeful tasks that can be organised, much like medicine or engineering. The father of modern management transformed it into a specific and systematic work based on an organised body of knowledge that is both teachable and learnable, rather than treating it as something esoteric and mysterious.
Drucker's insights can be of tremendous help to any management practitioner. But, they often ran contrary to what common sense advocated.
Drucker on Wikipedia.
Drucker on Career Moves.
We shall come back to Drucker a fair number of times over time on this blog. This blog essentially is about a few theorists trying to explain the real world. And there was no one who did it better than Drucker.
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