Practicing Management: doing “certain - and fairly simple - things”

When Peter Drucker was writing books such as The Effective Executive and Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices the practice of management in modern organizations was only taking shape, largely with his prodding and suggestions. Indeed, organizations themselves were only just becoming widely understood as the new fundamental fact about modern society. This is a topic that deserves attention in and of itself, and which we will cover in the near future.

What Drucker found, though, was that we still tend to operate based on traditional, culturally habitual, templates about the sorts of institutions upon which society is based, and about the sorts of people who lead them. This sort of thinking from the past expressed in the present continues, and is responsible for much of the writing about the personal characteristics of “leaders” and of the extraordinary claims made of - and demands made on - them that continues to obscure our understanding of management today.

Drucker hoped to clarify the issue by focusing our attention on why we have management, and managers, at all. His observations consistently led him to the belief that those who seek exceptional ability in their managers are doomed to disappointment. Rather, management is based not on who managers are, but what they do to contribute to the mission of their organizations. In perhaps his most concise description of this, he said, in “Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices,” that:

. . . one can define the work of a manager as planning, organizing, integrating, and measuring.”

As mentioned in previous posts in this series, this extends well beyond the mere control of the work of subordinates. It more closely resembles the straightforward definition of management offered last Friday as, simply, the administration and regulation of resources. This is a definition that comprehends everything from what some understand as personal leadership to the analysis and deployment of non-human resources of all sorts in an organization.

What it tends to de-emphasize is the suggestion that management consists in the peculiarly exceptional characteristics of certain people who are singularly capable of undertaking its exercise. Drucker insisted both that we lack the luxury to identify and employ sufficient numbers of such saviors in today’s organization-based societies, and that we need not trouble ourselves in the attempt: Management can be learned by any reasonably intelligent and motivated person by the disciplined study of and training in the practices that produce the work enumerated in his quote, above.

In the next post, we will turn to a look at what some of those are.

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Please be sure see all the posts in this series!