The Essential Drucker (Peter Drucker)

Peter Drucker is a legend in the management/corporate world.  He started writing about management in 1939, and continued producing books, articles and other media until 2004 (he died in 2005 at age 95).  He was tremendously influential in this sphere, and I believe many common management practices, beliefs and perspectives can be traced to him.  How do you take such a wealth of material and boil it down to its essence?  In The Essential Drucker, he (and presumably others) take snippets of his writings through the decades and paste them together into a book of highlights.

My kindle tells me I highlighted 289 passages in this 368-page book, so that alone tells you how I felt about it.  It was very good.  In fact, I'm still thinking about it, and will continue digesting Drucker's wisdom over the next few weeks.  There's a lot here, for sure.  I can't say I agreed with everything he said, but I still learned so much about communication, decisions, innovation, the changing landscape (the move to knowledge workers) and even the definition of leadership and how to define the value those in such positions can provide.  Since I'm new to leadership myself, this book really helped me start to think through some challenges I've been having from the start.  This is a real winner.

Rating: A

Below are just some of my favorite quotes from this book:

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.

Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.

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.

What the customer buys and considers value is never just a product. It is always a utility, that is, what a product or service does for him.

The most productive innovation is a different product or service creating a new potential of satisfaction, rather than an improvement.

If objectives are only good intentions, they are worthless. They must be transformed into work. And work is always specific, always has—or should have—clear, unambiguous, measurable results, a deadline and a specific assignment of accountability.

One does not “manage” people. The task is to lead people. And the goal is to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual.

it is the definition of a manager that in what he does he takes responsibility for the whole—that, in cutting stone, he “builds the cathedral.”

It is not intuitively obvious to most people that a new and different job requires new and different behavior.

Every knowledge worker in a modern organization is an “executive” if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he or she is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results.

Knowledge workers are rarely in synch with each other, precisely because they are knowledge workers. Each has his or her own skill and concerns.

The great majority of people tend to focus downward. They are occupied with efforts rather than with results.

The next generation should take for granted what the hard work and dedication of this generation has accomplished. They should then, standing on the shoulders of their predecessors, establish a new “high” as the baseline for the generation after them.

The knowledge worker, moreover, is usually a specialist. In fact, he can, as a rule, be effective only if he has learned to do one thing very well, that is, if he has specialized. By itself, however, a specialty is a fragment and sterile. Its output has to be put together with the output of other specialists before it can produce results.

It is barbarian arrogance to assume that the layman can or should make the effort to understand the specialist, and that it is enough if the person of knowledge talks to a handful of fellow experts who are his peers. Even in the university or in the research laboratory, this attitude—alas, only too common today—condemns the expert to uselessness and converts his knowledge from learning into pedantry.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time. In an ideally designed structure (which in a changing world is of course only a dream), there would be no meetings. Everybody would know what he needs to know to do his job. Everyone would have the resources available to him to do his job. We meet because people holding different jobs have to cooperate to get a specific task done.

Most books on decision-making tell the reader: First find the facts. But executives who make effective decisions know that one does not start with facts. One starts with opinions.

People inevitably start out with an opinion; to ask them to search for the facts first is even undesirable. They will simply do what everyone is far too prone to do anyhow: look for the facts that fit the conclusion they have already reached.

effective decision-makers deliberately disregard the second major command of the textbooks on decision-making and create dissension and disagreement, rather than consensus.

communications has proven as elusive as the unicorn.

it is the recipient who communicates. The so-called communicator, the person who emits the communication, does not communicate. He utters. Unless there is someone who hears, there is no communication. There is only noise.

There is no possibility of communication, in other words, unless we first know what the recipient, the true communicator, can see and why.

The foundation of effective leadership is thinking through the organization’s mission, defining it, and establishing it, clearly and visibly. The leader sets the goals, sets the priorities, and sets and maintains the standards.