Remembering Peter F. Drucker

From our Friday noon memo #7:

Peter Drucker is surely one of the most quoted management thinkers. Who hasn’t heard of “management by objectives”, his best-known practical management concept? Drucker’s hundredth birthday is a good reason to restate some of his ideas that appeal to us in particular:

• “No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.”
• “The only things that evolve by themselves in an organisation are disorder, friction, and malperformance.”

Clearly, you need to act against this entropy. So once you have a plan for your organisation to best achieve its purpose (Drucker was a genuine process thinker) he would remind you: “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”

What have you learned from Peter Drucker? Share it with us and comment to this blog.

Till next time. Natalia

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[David Lindelöf]

"Nothing has been disproved faster than the concept of the ``organization man,'' which was almost universally accepted forty years ago. In fact, the more satisfying one's knowledge work is, the more one needs a separate sphere of community activity."