Information Outlook, Vol. 5, No. 12, December 2001
The Essential Peter Drucker by Bruce Rosenstein
If we could read only one writer on our management bookshelf, it would be Peter Drucker. Even at 92, his career continues to unfold, making it possible for us to study him in real time, rather than as a historical figure.
One of the new breed of hip business magazines, Business 2.0, featured him on the cover of its October 2001 issue, as the top name in "The Business 2.0 Guru Guide." Through the years he has had other endorsements from icons of business, such as recently retired General Electric CEO Jack Welch and Intel's chairman, Andy Grove.
We are particularly fortunate that he will be the keynote speaker at the 2002 Special Libraries Association annual conference in Los Angeles. We don't know what he will tell us about management, but we can try to understand some of his main ideas, to better appreciate his message when we hear it
One idea is that every knowledge worker (in other words, the entire membership of SLA) is a manager, whether your title says it or not. So you must learn to manage yourself. Another is that management is not for business alone. Governments, churches, and nonprofits of all types must be well managed.
Drucker has also advocated periodically looking at what an organization does, and deciding what activities would be dropped if it could start all over again. Ideally, it would then drop those activities and do something more worthwhile. But as he demonstrates in his writings, this is easier said than done.
In his 839-page opus Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, published in 1974, he lays out "five basic operations in the work of a manager. Together they result in the integration of resources into a viable growing organism."
These operations are setting objectives (one of Drucker's most famous management tools is "Management by Objectives"), organizing and classifying (this should be second nature to Information Outlook readers), motivating and communicating, measuring (including decisions on "pay, placement and promotion"), and developing people (including yourself).
Drucker has written about management for more than fifty years. Some of his most important thoughts were collected recently as The Essential Drucker: Selections from the Management Works of Peter F. Drucker. It draws from ten books written between 1954 and 1999.
In a chapter taken from 1988's The New Realities, he attempts summing up "a few, very essential principles" on what management really is. He says it is about people and optimum joint performance; it is embedded in the culture of its country; it is a commitment to goals and values clearly set out and believed by the institution; it allows for growth and development of its individuals; it blends individual responsibility with communication; and it is a variety of factors that tell you how well you are doing, not just looking at the bottom line. Yet, in the end, only one thing matters. "The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside," he said. "The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a healed patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise, there are only costs."
We may not know what Drucker will say in his keynote, but we can look back to June 30, 1975, when he addressed the Association of College and Research Libraries, during ALA's annual conference in San Francisco. As reported in the September 1975 issue of College and Research Library News, Drucker "demonstrated a knowledge of the primary functions of libraries and librarians, which is rarely expressed outside of the profession. He obviously uses libraries and consults with librarians, whom he characterized as people who understand the dynamics of information and act as catalysts to convert data into information."
Selected Bibliography:
The Essential Drucker (HarperCollins,2001)
Management Challenges for the 21st Century (HarperCollins,1999)
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (HarperBusiness, 1974)
Managing In a Time of Great Change (Truman Talley Books/Dutton, 1995)
The Practice of Management (HarperBusiness, 1954)
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