This volume collects the most iconic and influential articles by Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005). To call it a representative sample belies the span and the volume of Drucker’s writing—38 articles and 39 books in all. But The Peter F. Drucker Reader does provide a useful window onto his thinking and his most enduring lessons about leadership, management, productivity, effectiveness, and, perhaps most important, the relationship of people and societies with their organizations.
Drucker’s ideas remain startlingly relevant. He was seemingly prescient. In writing so cogently about the burgeoning phenomenon of the “knowledge worker,” he was able to imagine with great accuracy how the balance of power would shift in organizations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and how their structure, focus, and purpose would change.
Drucker’s writing also shows remarkable range. As a matter of course, Drucker places specific management trends in their historical context, connecting, for example, the motivations of service and knowledge workers with the ideas of Frederick Taylor and Karl Marx. He is equally at home discussing organizational strategy, Japanese road systems, planned product obsolescence, activity-based costing, IT evolutions, the development of the Linotype machine, and the habits of individual World War II commanders.
To understand what Drucker is asking managers and executives to do, however, note his depth as well as his breadth—his remarkable ability to zoom in and out on a subject, his proclivity for connecting synthetic, big-picture thinking with detail-oriented, practical requirements. In his arguments he takes into consideration the whole of society, the organizations within it, the leaders of those organizations, and the individuals who make up the work-force. The “effective” executive Drucker describes as an ideal has this same capacity for zooming in and out, focused as much on the changing world economy as on an upcoming meeting; as concerned for the organization’s next big strategic move as for the motivation and productivity of individual employees. It’s not that executives need to focus on everything — that would hardly be efficient. But to be effective, they must be disciplined about their management of important things both large and seemingly small.
Drucker could state a complex idea simply, clearly, and often briefly. He is recognized as a master of aphorism. Many an executive’s PowerPoint has been decorated with pithy quotes from him that ring as true now as they did 40 years ago: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently what should not be done at all.” “The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.” “You cannot build performance on weakness. You can build only on strengths.”
But to read only his aphorisms is to miss much of his most useful advice. Thus HBR has gathered the Drucker essays that will help you be a truly “effective” executive.
In “What Makes an Effective Executive,” Drucker argues that charisma is not, in fact, a necessary factor of leadership. He identifies eight practices that effective leaders follow, ranging from big-picture tasks such as asking themselves, “What is right for the enterprise?” to fundamental managerial skills such as running productive meetings. Taken together, these practices yield the knowledge the executive needs, help translate it into action, and ensure that the whole organization feels responsible and accountable for success.
In “The Theory of the Business,” Drucker addresses “what to do”—what some might call business strategy. Beginning with the question of why successful companies stagnate, he homes in on the challenge of matching an organization’s priorities and goals with the changing realities of a changing world and then making sure that competencies are in place to achieve them.
The primary responsibility of a manager is to strive for the best possible economic results from the resources currently available, Drucker states in “Managing for Business Effectiveness.” This requires making a distinction between efficiency and effectiveness: Efficiency is about getting the maximum amount done—but effectiveness is about getting the best results. Hence Drucker advocates focusing on just those product lines that produce the most revenue (in contrast to the product proliferation we see today). He proposes three steps for managers to determine which they are and act to decrease this clutter. 1
In “The Effective Decision,” Drucker describes an approach for executives facing choices that will impact their entire organizations. He argues that such decisions must not be made quickly, because the best measure of their quality lies not in speed but in whether they are put into action and have a positive effect. His process grapples with the inherent compromise between what is ideal and what is possible—between the big picture of organizational objectives and threats and the quotidian realities of execution.
“Executives spend more time on managing people and making people decisions than on anything else—and they should,” Drucker writes in “How to Make People Decisions.” By looking closely at the practices of George C. Marshall (U.S. Army chief of staff during World War II) and Alfred P. Sloan (who led General Motors for four decades), he draws general principles and outlines steps for making sound people decisions. Here we see precursors of ideas he developed elsewhere—the emphasis on developing the strengths (rather than attending to the weaknesses) of the employee that he brings to the fore in the later “Managing Oneself”; the careful consideration of implementation in the earlier “The Effective Decision.” Throughout, Drucker highlights situations in which an employee’s failure is the fault of management, of the way the job is built, or of how the person was chosen for it.
“They’re Not Employees, They’re People” examines the shift to more temporary, impersonal arrangements between people and the organizations they work for, which is ongoing. If “developing talent is business’s most important task,” as Drucker argues, this shift presents some real dangers. In his exploration of its cultural context, Drucker examines such factors as employment regulations and their impact on small businesses especially, and the rise of knowledge work. He warns corporate leaders that however it evolves, “in a knowledge workforce, the system must serve the worker.”
Echoes of this idea can be seen throughout Drucker’s writings, in which he pragmatically considers that workers’ needs are just as integral to the overall corporate system as executives’. For about a century after industrialization, for example, increased economic productivity necessarily came from increased manufacturing and logistics outputs. By the late 20th century, however, many more people were employed in knowledge and service work than in industry, and Drucker recognized that it was in those sectors that any meaningful new productivity gains would need to be made. He discusses this in “The New Productivity Challenge” in the context of class warfare and its 19th-century Industrial Revolution origins and concludes that a partnership between employee and manager is a requirement for raising productivity.
Nonprofit management is not often held up as an exemplar for corporate leaders. Yet in “What Business Can Learn from Nonprofits,” Drucker argues that nonprofits are leading the way in the motivation and productivity of knowledge workers and are stronger than most for-profit organizations in their strategy and board effectiveness.
In “The New Society of Organizations,” Drucker defines the relationship of the organization to society at large. Disagreeing with Milton Friedman that the only responsibility of business is its own economic performance, he foresees a world that looks to both corporations and nonprofits for cures for its biggest social ills.
“Managing Oneself” has the greatest reach beyond the management literature of all Drucker’s work. Applicable and accessible to any professionals—not just executives and managers—it has become so influential perhaps because of the simplicity of the self-reflection it encourages; perhaps because we find a surprising amount to identify with in Drucker’s exploration of our strengths and weaknesses; or perhaps because permission to have strengths and weaknesses empowers us in a new way. Indeed, empowerment is the outcome of the piece: It is in our hands to shape our careers and our success.
To Drucker, effectiveness comes from asking “What needs to be done?” rather than just making current operations more efficient. This kind of work continues to be critical even as entire segments of our economy are automated. As early as 1963, Drucker wrote that “while there is plenty of labor-saving machinery around, no one has yet invented a ‘work-saving’ machine, let alone a ‘think-saving’ one.” Although big data and analytics are beginning to help us with the question of what needs to be done, his exhortation to make those decisions thoughtfully remains as relevant as ever—to our careers, to our organizations, and to our society.
—The Editors
1. This article includes one of the surprisingly few instances in which Drucker exhibits the myopia of his time, citing “older, unmarried women” and “clean-up men on the night shift” as primary sources of employee complaint.