The Essential Drucker

by Peter Drucker

Amazon Link: The Essential Drucker

“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 the knowledge worker has mobility.” — source

Timeless in Time

A tip of the hat to Time magazine, which has selected Peter Drucker’s The Essential Drucker as one of “the 25 most influential business management books” of all time.

Notably, this is the only book on the list that is a compendium, an apparent nod to the fact that there were too many landmark Drucker titles to choose from.

Time called The Essential Drucker “a potent 26-piece collection” and noted that the essays within it were “selected by Drucker himself in 2001 as a comprehensive representation of his life’s work.”

Of Drucker the man, the magazine said: “For most of the last half of the 20th century, he was the superstar CEO’s go-to guru, counseling everyone from Alfred Sloan to Andy Grove.

And not in the fuzzy-headed, inspirational, bromide-spouting guru sense you see today.

Drucker had no time for discussing who moved your cheese, and his insights were distinctive for being simultaneously crystalline yet deeply contrarian—and, frequently, a generation ahead of their time.”

Also see Management, Revised Edition for more breadth and depth

Introduction: The Origin And Purpose Of The Essential Drucker

The Essential Drucker is a selection from my sixty years of work and writing on management—see bibliography.

It begins with my book The Future of Industrial Man (1942) and ends (so far at least) with my 1999 book Management Challenges for the 21st Century.

The Essential Drucker has two purposes.

First, it offers, I hope, a coherent and fairly comprehensive Introduction to Management.

But second, it gives an Overview of my works on management and thus answers a question that my editors and I have been asked again and again, Where do I start to read Drucker?

Which of his writings are essential?

Atsuo Ueda, longtime Japanese friend, first conceived The Essential Drucker.

He himself has had a distinguished career in Japanese management.

And having reached the age of sixty, he recently started a second career and became the founder and chief executive officer of a new technical university in Tokyo.

But for thirty years Mr. Ueda has also been my Japanese translator and editor.

He has actually translated many of my books several times as they went into new Japanese editions.

He is thus thoroughly famliar with my work—in fact, he knows it better than I do.

As a result he increasingly got invited to conduct Japanese conferences and seminars on my work and found himself being asked over and over again—especially by younger people, both students and executives at the start of their careers—Where do I start reading Drucker?

This led Mr. Ueda to reread my entire work, to select from it the most pertinent chapters and to abridge them so that they read as if they had originally been written as one cohesive text.

The result was a three volume essential Drucker of fifty-seven chapters—one volume on the management of organizations; one volume on the individual in the society of organizations; one on society in general—which was published in Japan in the summer and fall of 2000 and has met with great success.

It is also being published in Taiwan, mainland China and Korea, and in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil.

It is Mr. Ueda’s text that is being used for the U.S. and U.K. editions of The Essential Drucker.

But these editions not only are less than half the size of Mr. Ueda’s original Japanese version twenty-six chapters versus the three-volumes’ fifty-seven.

They also have a somewhat different focus.

Cass Canfield Jr. at HarperCollins in the United States—longtime friend and my U.S. editor for over thirty years—also came to the conclusion a few years ago that there was need for an introduction to, and overview of, my sixty years of management writings.

But he—rightly—saw that the U.S. and U.K. (and probably altogether the Western) audience for such a work would be both broader and narrower than the audience for the Japanese venture.

It would be broader because

there is in the West a growing number of people who, while not themselves executives, have come to see management as an area of public interest;

there are also an increasing number of students in colleges and universities who, while not necessarily management students, see an understanding of management as part of a general education;

and, finally, there are a large and rapidly growing number of mid-career managers and professionals who are flocking to advanced-executive programs, both in universities and in their employing organizations.

The focus would, however, also be narrower because these additional audiences need and want less an introduction to, and overview of, Drucker’s work than they want a concise, comprehensive, and sharply focused Introduction to Management, and to management alone.

And thus, while using Mr. Ueda’s editing and abridging, Cass Canfield Jr. (with my full, indeed my enthusiastic, support) selected and edited the texts from the Japanese three-volume edition into a comprehensive, cohesive, and self-contained introduction to management—both of the management of an enterprise and of the self-management of the individual, whether executive or professional, within an enterprise and altogether in our society of managed organizations.

My readers as well as I owe to both Atsuo Ueda and Cass Canfield Jr. an enormous debt of gratitude.

The two put an incredible amount of work and dedication into The Essential Drucker.

And the end product is not only the best introduction to one’s work any author could possibly have asked for.

It is also, I am convinced, a truly unique, cohesive, and self-contained introduction to management, its basic principles and concerns; its problems, challenges, opportunities.

Contents of The Essential Drucker

Introduction: The Origin and Purpose of TED (see above)

I. MANAGEMENT

1. Management as Social Function and Liberal Art

2. The Dimensions of Management

3. The Purpose and Objectives of a Business

The profit motive and its offspring maximization of profits are just as irrelevant to the function of a business, the purpose of a business, and the job of managing a business.

 

In fact, the concept is worse than irrelevant: it does harm.

It is a major cause of the misunderstanding of the nature of profit in our society and of the deep-seated hostility to profit, which are among the most dangerous diseases of an industrial society.

It is largely responsible for the worst mistakes of public policy—in this country as well as in Western Europe—which are squarely based on the failure to understand the nature, function, and purpose of business enterprise.

And it is in large part responsible for the prevailing belief that there is an inherent contradiction between profit and a company’s ability to make a social contribution.

Actually, a company can make a social contribution only if it is highly profitable.

What Executives Should Remember

4. What the Nonprofits Are Teaching Business (find in Management, Revised Edition

5. Social Impacts and Social Problems

6. Management’s New Paradigms (PDF)

7. The Information Executives Need Today

8. Management by Objectives and Self-Control (see below)

9. Picking People—The Basic Rules

The following three chapters are from Innovation and Entrepreneurship

10. The Entrepreneurial Business

11. The New Venture

12. Entrepreneurial Strategies

II. THE INDIVIDUAL

13. Effectiveness Must Be Learned (see the Effective Executive)

14. Focus on Contribution

15. Know Your Strengths and Values

16. Know Your Time

17. Effective Decisions → PDF

18. Functioning Communications

19. Leadership as Work

20. Principles of Innovation (see Innovation and Entrepreneurship

21. The Second Half of Your Life (also see Managing the Non-Profit Organization)

22. The Educated Person

III. SOCIETY

(also see Post-Capitalist Society)

23. A Century of Social Transformation — (From farmers and domestic servants to …) Emergence of Knowledge Society

24. The Coming of Entrepreneurial Society

25. Citizenship through the Social Sector (includes the need for community) (see Managing the Non-Profit Organization)

26. From Analysis to Perception—The New Worldview.

About perception. Form and Function Connections: see chapters On Being the Right Size and On Being the Wrong Size in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices and others.

Afterword: The Challenge Ahead

The paradox of rapidly expanding economy and growing income inequality—the paradox that bedevils us now

Growing health care and education, possibly a shrinking market for goods and services

Center of power shifting to the consumer—free flow of information

Knowledge workers—expensive resource

Governments depending on managers and individuals

This volume, as said before, is also an overview of my works on management. Readers may therefore want to know where to go in my books to further pursue this or that topic or this or that area of particular interest to them. Here, therefore, are the sources in my books for each of twenty-six chapters of the The Essential Drucker:

Chapter 1 and 26 are excerpted from The New Realities (1988).

Chapters 2, 3, 5, 18 are excerpted from Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1974).

Chapters 4 and 19 are excerpted from Managing for the Future (1992), and were first published in the Harvard Business Review (1989) and in the Wall Street Journal (1988), respectively.

Chapters 6, 15, and 21 are excerpted from Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999).

Chapters 7 and 23 are excerpted from Management in a Time of Great Change (1995) and were first published in the Harvard Business Review (1994) and in the Atlantic Monthly (1996), respectively.

Chapter 8 was excerpted from The Practice of Management (1954).

Chapter 9 was excerpted from The Frontiers of Management (1986) and was first published in the Harvard Business Review (1985).

Chapters 10, 11, 12, 20, 24 were excerpted from Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1985).

Chapters 13, 14, 16, 17 were excerpted from The Effective Executive (1966).

Chapters 22 and 25 were excerpted from Post-Capitalist Society (1993).

All these books are still in print in the United States and in many other countries.

This one-volume edition of The Essential Drucker does not, however, include any excerpts from five important Management books of mine:

The Future of Industrial Man (1942);

Concept of the Corporation (1946);

Managing for Results (1964; the first book on what is now called "strategy," a term unknown for business forty years ago);

Managing in Turbulent Times (1980);

Managing the Non-Profit Organization (1990).

These are important books and still widely read and used.

But their subject matter is more specialized—and in some cases also more technical—than that of the books from which the chapters of the present book were chosen—and thus had to be left out of a work that calls itself Essential.

—Peter F. Drucker
Claremont, California
Spring 2001

“Most mistakes in thinking are mistake in PERCEPTION:

SEEING only part of the situation et al.;

Jumping to conclusions; and

Misinterpretation caused by feelings”

— Edward de Bono

Management By Objectives And Self-Control

Any business enterprise must build a true team and weld individual efforts into a common effort.

Each member of the enterprise contributes something different, but they must all contribute toward a common goal.

Their efforts must all pull in the same direction, and their contributions must fit together to produce a whole—without gaps, without friction, without unnecessary duplication of effort.

 

Business performance therefore requires that each job be directed toward the objectives of the whole business.

And in particular each manager's job must be focused on the success of the whole.

The performance that is expected of the manager must be derived from the performance goals of the business; his results must be measured by the contribution they make to the success of the enterprise.

The manager must know and understand what the business goals demand of him in terms of performance, and his superior must know what contribution to demand and expect of him—and must judge him accordingly.

If these requirements are not met, managers are misdirected.

Their efforts are wasted.

Instead of teamwork, there is friction, frustration, and conflict.

 

Management by objectives requires major effort and special instruments.

For in the business enterprise, managers are not automatically directed toward a common goal.

Career / life vision guidance from Peter Drucker — extremely, extremely, extremely valuable attention-directing concepts and ideas from a long-term standpoint.

Larger

Career and Life Guidance from Peter Drucker
is attention-directing work

The Daily Drucker offers more breadth

Toward tomorrows

Toward unimagined futures

The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939) There’s still lots to learn here!!!!

The Future of Industrial Man (1943)

The New Society: The Anatomy of Industrial Order (1950)

Landmarks of Tomorrow (1957)

The Age of Discontinuity (1968)

The New Realities (1988)

Post-Capitalist Society (1993)

Managing in the Next Society (2002); Last section originally published earlier in The Economist (http://economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=770819)

Comprehensive Management Books

About management

Concept of the Corporation

Practice of Management

Managing for Results

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The Essential Drucker — An “introduction” to management for …

… But he—rightly—saw that the U.S. and U.K. (and probably altogether the Western) audience for such a work would be both broader and narrower than the audience for the Japanese venture.

It would be broader because there is in the West a growing number of people who, while not themselves executives, have come to see management as an area of public interest; there are also an increasing number of students in colleges and universities who, while not necessarily management students, see an understanding of management as part of a general education; and, finally, there are a large and rapidly growing number of mid-career managers and professionals who are flocking to advanced-executive programs, both in universities and in their employing organizations.

The focus would, however, also be narrower because these additional audiences need and want less an introduction to, and overview of, Drucker's work than they want a concise, comprehensive, and sharply focused Introduction to Management, and to management alone. …

Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management (a collection of articles published in HBR)

The future that has already happened

Managing the Non-Profit Organization

Management, Revised Edition

Management Cases (Revised Edition)

The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization

“Time Related” Management Books

Important ways to “see” otherwise invisible aspects of reality and to relocate one's brain to unfamiliar territory.

Some of the chapter topics have made their way into The Daily Drucker

The subtopics below selected book titles are not the entire contents that book.

---

Managing in Turbulent Times

Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays

 

The Changing World of The Executive

A Scorecard for Management

… “bottom line” is not even an appropriate measure of management performance

Performance in Appropriating Capital

Performance on People Decisions

Innovation Performance

Planning Performance (reality vs. expectations)

Learning From Foreign Management

Demand responsibility from their employees

Thought through their benefits policies more carefully

Take marketing seriously — knowing what is value for the customer

Base their marketing and innovation strategies on the systematic and purposeful abandonment

Longer-term investment or opportunities budgets

Leaders responsible for the development of proper policies in the national interest

Aftermath of a Go-Go Decade

Managing Capital Productivity

Measuring Business Performance

Performance in a business means applying capital productively and there is only one appropriate yardstick of business performance: return on all assets employed or on all capital invested

Good Growth and Bad Growth

Managing the Knowledge Worker

Frontiers of Management

Measuring White Collar Productivity

Getting Control of Staff Work

Slimming Management’s Midriff

The No-Growth Enterprise

Why Automation Pays Off

Managing for the Future

The New Productivity Challenge

Manage by walking around — Outside!

Permanent cost cutting: permanent policy

Four marketing lessons for the future

Company performance: five telltale tests

Market standing

Innovative performance

Productivity

Liquidity and Cash Flows

Profitability

No Precise Readings

The trend toward alliances for progress

The emerging theory of manufacturing

Sell the Mailroom. Unbundling in the ‘90s

Managing in a Time of Great Change

The theory of the business

Planning for uncertainty

The five deadly business sins

Management Challenges for the 21st Century

Managing in the Next Society

Landscape intel updates

How have things changed since the original was written?

And who will work on each of these — now and tomorrow?

What’s the information?

What New Institutions Can be Seen?

The topics below are chapter title examples extracted from Drucker’s work. Additional topics can unearthed by more detailed analysis

Trade Lessons from the World Economy

Where the New Markets Are

The Pacific Rim and the World Economy

China’s Growth Markets

The New Superpower. The Overseas Chinese

Can the Democracies Win the Peace?

The Transnational Economy

The Futures Already Around Us

From World Trade to World Investment

The Lessons of the US Export Boom

Low Wages. No Longer a Competitive Edge

Help Latin America and Help Ourselves

Mexico’s Ace in the Hole. The Maquiladora

Individually Aimed Books by Drucker

Managing Oneself

The Effective Executive

The Effective Executive in Action

The Executive in Action: Three Drucker Management Books on What to Do and Why and How to Do It

Managing for Results, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and The Effective Executive with a new preface by the author

What Executives Should Remember (a valuable summary of several core concepts)

The Daily Drucker (an introduction to broad range of his thoughts)

The Daily Drucker table of contents worksheet

Drucker on Asia — A Dialogue Between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi

Adventures of a Bystander

Books about Drucker and his ideas

Drucker and Me by Bob Buford

The Definitive Drucker

Inside Drucker's Brain

A Class With Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher

Drucker on Leadership: New Lessons from the Father of Modern Management

The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy

The Drucker Difference

Drucker's Lost Art of Management: Peter Drucker’s Timeless Vision for Building Effective Organizations

Drucker: A Life in Pictures

Drucker Essay Collections

Although written years ago, these essays can be valuable attention directing tools. They can take your brain to places (brain addresses and brain roads) it wouldn't naturally go. What has changed and what is likely to change?

Technology, Management and Society

Men, Ideas & Politics

Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays

The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition

A Functioning Society: Selections from Sixty-Five Years of Writing on Community, Society, and Polity

TLN Keywords: tlnkwdruckerbook

“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 (PDF) 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

“More than anything else,

the individual
has to take more responsibility
for himself or herself,
rather than depend on the company.”
continue ↓

“Making a living is no longer enough
‘Work’ has to make a life .” continue

… finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle

The Second Curve

These pages are attention directing tools for navigating a world moving relentlessly toward unimagined futures.

What’s the next effective action on the road ahead

It’s up to you to figure out what to harvest and calendarize
— working something out in time (1915, 1940, 1970 … 2040 … the outer limit of your concern) — nobody is going to do it for you.

It may be a step forward to actively reject something (rather than just passively ignoring) and then working out a plan for coping with what you’ve rejected.

Your future is between your ears and our future is between our collective ears — it can’t be otherwise.

A site exploration: The memo THEY don't want you to see

What needs doing?

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