Managing People

This topic will bubble to the top of my to do list sometime soon.

In the meantime think about managing people at: HP, Kodak, and other organizations in trouble

From The Practice of Management — 1954

A few years ago I received the following letter from the president of a company:

I employ 2,300 people mostly women doing unskilled assembly work. Please send me at your earliest convenience a suitable personnel policy and enclose a statement of your fee.

For a long time I thought this letter a good, though unintentional, joke. But lately it has dawned on me that the laugh was really on me. My correspondent, I have come to suspect, is much like the child in Andersen’s story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who had the innocence to say out loud that the emperor was naked when everybody else was trying to pretend that he could see the ruler’s garments.

A good deal of what passes today for management of the human organization is mechanical in nature and might indeed be dispensed by mail. The two generally accepted concepts of managing the worker—Personnel Administration and Human Relations—see the task to be done as something one tacks onto a business. To manage worker and work does not seem to require any change in the way the business is being conducted. And the tools and concepts needed seem to apply equally to any business.

See my management-people delicious tag

Amazon link: People and Performance: The Best of Peter Drucker on Management

List of topics in this Folder

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic”. — Peter Drucker

The shift from manual workers who do as they are being told — either by the task or by the boss — to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves ↓ profoundly challenges social structure …

“Managing Oneself is a REVOLUTION in human affairs.” … “It also requires an almost 180-degree change in the knowledge workers’ thoughts and actions from what most of us—even of the younger generation—still take for granted as the way to think and the way to act.” …

… “Managing Oneself is based on the very opposite realities: Workers are likely to outlive organizations (and therefore, employers can’t be depended on for designing your life), and the knowledge worker has mobility.” ← in a context

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