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The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials) Reissue Edition, Kindle Edition
Father of modern management, social commentator, and preeminent business philosopher, Peter F. Drucker analyzed economics and society for more than sixty years. Now for readers everywhere who are concerned with the ways that management practices and principles affect the performance of organizations, individuals, and society, there is The Essential Drucker—an invaluable compilation of essential materials from the works of a management legend.
Containing twenty-six core selections, The Essential Drucker covers the basic principles and concerns of management and its problems, challenges, and opportunities, giving managers, executives, and professionals the tools to perform the tasks that the economy and society of tomorrow will demand of them.
- ISBN-109780061793622
- ISBN-13978-0061345012
- EditionReissue
- PublisherHarperCollins e-books
- Publication dateOctober 13, 2009
- LanguageEnglish
- File size1358 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Reaching back as far as 1954 with his treatise "Management by Objectives and Self-Control" ("Each manager, from the 'big boss' down to the production foreman or the chief clerk, needs clearly spelled-out objectives" that clarify expected contributions "to the attainment of company goals in all areas of the business"), Drucker's now-established ideas take on a surprising new relevancy when remixed equally pioneering ideas from the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s. Between the thoughtful "Management as Social and Liberal Art" through the provocative "From Analysis to Perception--The New Worldview" (both originally published in 1988's The New Realities), this book revisits some of modern management's most inspired writing and presents it in a way that should appeal to both newcomers and those needing a refresher course on Drucker's basic beliefs. --Howard Rothman
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Required reading for management students and practitioners alike...an extremely useful and thought-provoking compendium.
-- "People Management"Indispensible...Drucker's now-established ideas take on a surprising new relevancy.
-- "Amazon.com, editorial review"About the Author
Timothy Andres Pabon is an English- and Spanish-speaking voice-over artist who has worked extensively in advertising and audiobook narration. He has had acting roles on House of Cards and has also been a costar on HBO's acclaimed series The Wire opposite country music legend Steve Earl. As a stage actor, he has worked off-Broadway at the June Havoc Theatre, and his regional credits include Center Stage, the Shakespeare Theatre, Arena Stage, the Hippodrome, Olney Theatre, Rep Stage, and GALA Hispanic Theatre.
Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005), author of over thirty-five books, is considered one of the most influential originators of business management, whose ideas have shaped the modern corporation. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Essential Drucker
The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on ManagementBy Peter DruckerHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2008 Peter DruckerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061345012
Chapter One
Management as Social Function and Liberal Art
When Karl Marx was beginning work on Das Kapital in the 185Os, the phenomenon of management was unknown. So were the enterprises that managers run. The largest manufacturing company around was a Manchester cotton mill employing fewer than three hundred people and owned by Marx's friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. And in Engels's mill—one of the most profitable businesses of its day—there were no "managers," only "charge hands" who, themselves workers, enforced discipline over a handful of fellow "proletarians."
Rarely in human history has any institution emerged as quickly as management or had as great an impact so fast. In less than 150 years, management has transformed the social and economic fabric of the world's developed countries. It has created a global economy and set new rules for countries that would participate in that economy as equals. And it has itself been transformed. Few executives are aware of the tremendous impact management has had. Indeed, a good many are like M. Jourdain, the character in Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who did not know that he spoke prose. They barely realize that they practice—or mispractice—management. As a result, they are ill prepared for the tremendous challenges that now confront them. The truly important problems managers face do not come from technology or politics; they do not originate outside of management and enterprise. They are problems caused by the very success of management itself.
To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change. But the very meaning of this task has changed, if only because the performance of management has converted the workforce from one composed largely of unskilled laborers to one of highly educated knowledge workers.
The Origins and Development of Management
On the threshold of World War I, a few thinkers were just becoming aware of management's existence. But few people even in the most advanced countries had anything to do with it. Now the largest single group in the labor force, more than one-third of the total, are people whom the U.S. Bureau of the Census calls "managerial and professional." Management has been the main agent of this transformation. Management explains why, for the first time in human history, we can employ large numbers of knowledgeable, skilled people in productive work. No earlier society could do this. Indeed, no earlier society could support more than a handful of such people. Until quite recently, no one knew how to put people with different skills and knowledge together to achieve common goals.
Eighteenth-century China was the envy of contemporary Western intellectuals because it supplied more jobs for educated people than all of Europe did—some twenty thousand per year. Today, the United States, with about the same population China then had, graduates nearly a million college students a year, few of whom have the slightest difficulty finding well-paid employment. Management enables us to employ them.
Knowledge, especially advanced knowledge, is always specialized. By itself it produces nothing. Yet a modern business, and not only the largest ones, may employ up to ten thousand highly knowledgeable people who represent up to sixty different knowledge areas. Engineers of all sorts, designers, marketing experts, economists, statisticians, psychologists, planners, accountants, human-resources people-all working together in a joint venture. None would be effective without the managed enterprise.
There is no point in asking which came first, the educational explosion of the last one hundred years or the management that put this knowledge to productive use. Modern management and modern enterprise could not exist without the knowledge base that developed societies have built. But equally, it is management, and management alone, that makes effective all this knowledge and these knowledgeable people. The emergence of management has converted knowledge from social ornament and luxury into the true capital of any economy.
Not many business leaders could have predicted this development back in 1870, when large enterprises were first beginning to take shape. The reason was not so much lack of foresight as lack of precedent. At that time, the only large permanent organization around was the army. Not surprisingly, therefore, its commandand-control structure became the model for the men who were putting together transcontinental railroads, steel mills, modern banks, and department stores. The command model, with a very few at the top giving orders and a great many at the bottom obeying them, remained the norm for nearly one hundred years. But it was never as static as its longevity might suggest. On the contrary, it began to change almost at once, as specialized knowledge of all sorts poured into enterprise.
The first university-trained engineer in manufacturing industry was hired by Siemens in Germany in 1867—his name was Friedrich von Hefner-Alteneck. Within five years he had built a research department. Other specialized departments followed suit. By World War I the standard functions of a manufacturer had been developed: research and engineering, manufacturing, sales, finance and accounting, and a little later, human resources (or personnel).
Even more important for its impact on enterprise—and on the world economy in general—was another management-directed development that took place at this time. That was the application of management to manual work in the form of training. The child of wartime necessity, training has propelled the transformation of the world economy in the last forty years because it allows low-wage countries to do something that traditional economic theory had said could never be done: to become efficient—and yet still low-wage—competitors almost overnight.
Adam Smith reported that it took several hundred years for a country or region to develop a tradition of labor and the expertise in manual and managerial skills needed to produce and market a given product, whether cotton textiles or violins...
Continues...
Excerpted from The Essential Druckerby Peter Drucker Copyright © 2008 by Peter Drucker. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B000FC11LK
- Publisher : HarperCollins e-books; Reissue edition (October 13, 2009)
- Publication date : October 13, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 1358 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 368 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0061345016
- Best Sellers Rank: #108,393 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #17 in Management Skills
- #68 in Business Teams
- #198 in Company Business Profiles (Books)
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About the author
Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005) was considered the top management thinker of his time. He authored over 25 books, with his first, The End of Economic Man published in 1939. His ideas have had an enormous impact on shaping the modern corporation. One of his most famous disciples alive today is Jack Welch. He was a teacher, philosopher, reporter and consultant.
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"The Essential Drucker" it seemed, would be the right way to do my duty to history. Here I could quickly peruse a medley of the Drucker's outdated thoughts, and move on.
Oh how wrong I was.
Drucker's writing is as fresh and relevant today as when first written. His prescient insights foreshadow many recent works. Indeed, I found the essence of Tom Collins in the first few chapters; condensed and not said in quite the same way, of course, but the principle insights were the same. Drucker has reminded me that fundamental truths are timeless.
And there is something else I especially like; the tone. Drucker writes like a commander. He has confidence - not a blaring promotional edge - but a sense of solidity and authority that comes from saying things meaningful, clear, practical, logical; things from someone with his feet firmly on the ground.
Don't miss this book if you are not sure of where to start with Drucker. It may whet your appetite for more Drucker.
I wish my supervisors would read and follow this book, they would save a GREAT deal of headache, all sorts of trouble, and probably cut the very high turnover by at least 75%. Whether you are a laborer or top CEO or president of a corporation, everyone can learn something from Drucker. I guarantee it will be well worth your time and money. Making its precepts key to your business will definitely pay handsome dividends both short and long term.
"The Essential Drucker" (TED) is definitely worth reading, for anyone with a modicum of interest in organizational management. For someone like myself, with a good number of years in business, it served as an excellent refresher course and validated many of my own beliefs about management, and the teachings that I've received through other channels. Drucker's writings are the antithesis of faddish, flaky management theories; he advocates a very solid, non-flashy, heads-down, customer and results focused approach to management that also manages to be humane. There are so many nuggets of wisdom sprinkled throughout TED that I would not be doing justice to the book to highlight only a few of them. One impression that comes across strongly, reading thoughts that Drucker put to paper decades ago, is just how true and applicable they are today.
Having heaped much praise on Drucker and TED, I'm obligated to point out the book's major flaw, which is a function of the way it was put together. Drucker has produced so much writing on so many topics that it is perhaps an impossible task to condense the highlights into a single volume, and still retain anything close to the full force of his arguments. Reading TED, it appears that what most often was edited out (but not always, to be fair) was the evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) in support of his theories. You still get the theories and the declarative statements, but what is often missing is the supporting evidence and examples of the application of the theories, to provide a proper context. A veteran manager can supply these from one's own personal experience, as I was often able to do, but I feel that inexperienced readers, such as the students who Drucker claims are part of the target audience for TED, might struggle with the book.
Given that Drucker and his editor decided to make a single volume rather than two or three, TED is a worthwhile summary of a lifetime's work from a great management thinker, and a decent overall survey of 20th century management theory and practices.