Management Thoughts from Peter Drucker
Although Peter Drucke,r one of the most influential management thinkers of the past Century, has been gone a while his thoughts, ideas and words live on. Here are six comments taken from The Essential Drucker, HarperCollins Publishers, 2001
- Management is about human beings. It’s task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.
- Because management deals with the integration of people in a common venture, it is deeply embedded in culture. What managers do in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in the United States, in Japan, or in Brazil is exactly the same. How they do it may be quite different.
- Every enterprise is learning and teaching institution. Training and development must be built into it on all levels-training and development that never stop.
- Profitability is not the purpose of, but a limiting factor on business enterprise and business activity. Profit is not the explanation, cause or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but rather the test of their validity.
- True marketing starts out… with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, what do we want to sell? It asks, What does the customer want to buy?
- In every single business failure of a large company in the last few decades, the board was the last to realize that things were going wrong. To find a truly effective board you are much better advised to look in the nonprofit sector than in our public corporations.
It seems that even though Peter Drucker has been gone for a while his writings continue to be relevant no matter what generation is leading our business enterprises. These and many if not all of Mr. Druckers writings seem to stand the test of time
